[10156] in Athena Bugs
[jh@oobleck.mit.edu: help needs to be a bit more error-proof]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein)
Fri Dec 18 11:27:45 1992
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 92 11:27:37 -0500
From: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 20:45:30 -0500
From: jh@oobleck.mit.edu (Joe Harrington)
To: software_suggestions@MIT.EDU
Subject: help needs to be a bit more error-proof
Cc: jh@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@MIT.EDU
It just took olc 55 hours to figure out why help couldn't start a
viewer. To make a long story short:
I'm on a non-athena decstation running ultrix 4.2. I'm remotely
logged into an athena maxine. I type
/usr/athena/bin/help
a window pops up. That's good. I select some categories and finally
it tries to start a viewer. It fails. The error message is "Could
not start a viewer!" This is useless! Which viewer? Why not? I ask
OLC.
Olc first suggests Andrew fonts. OK, fair enough, the server's on my
decstation, not athena's, so I attach andrew and add the fonts to my
path and rehash. But that's not it. The consultant then asks if
/mit/andrew/decmipsbin is in my path on athena. No, and that's why it
was failing. How am I supposed to know what all the viewers are and
what all the resources they may need are?
Since this is a help viewer, I think it should be able to act entirely
without knowledge of my setup -- path, attached lockers, etc. Here
are my suggestions, in the order that they would have helped:
1. Better error message: what viewer and why did it fail, in this
case.
2. Fallback on text-only mode (which I didn't know existed) after
giving the message.
3. Depend on nothing. If the program needs resources, it should
attach them; if it needs to start another program, it should do so by
absolute path, and not depend on mine. Who knows what I'm giving it,
and since it's a help viewer, I could be a user with a messed up path
trying to find out how to fix that.
--jh--
