[Fwd: Re: [scmbug-users] Error on changing status of bugs with Bugzilla 3.4.x]

[Kristis Makris]

Hello,

How does bugzilla 3.2/3.4/3.6 handle errors with Bug::check() ? Does it
throw exceptions with die() ? Is this necessary ?

I'm sure you folks must have a more user-friendly API than this. We must
be missing something.

We are discussing this on:

http://lists.mkgnu.net/pipermail/scmbug-users/2010-April/002745.html

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Yavor Nikolov <nikolov.javor at gmail.com>
To: Kristis Makris <mkgnu at mkgnu.net>
Cc: scmbug-users <scmbug-users at lists.mkgnu.net>
Subject: Re: [scmbug-users] Error on changing status of bugs with
Bugzilla 3.4.x
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:24:25 +0300

Bugzilla does throw exceptions (in a "die" way) on certain places: e.g.
- on calling Bug::check(), when providing bad user
- Invalid duplicate bug id
... etc.

I.e. - more often Bugzilla throws exception when error is encountered
(bad parameter, lack of permissions, etc.) than returning an error code.
Actually - exception handling is in general a cleaner approach to manage
error situations than dealing with return codes. Just the die/eval/$@/..
is some kind of limited workaround since older versions of Perl didn't
have exceptions.

So what happens if we don't catch these exceptions: scmbug dies, error
message is logged in scmbug log. However end user gets a general purpose
error which doesn't explain the root cause of the problem (i.e. user
receives something like "scmbug died for unknown reason" than duplicate
bug id is bad; or we don't have permissions to edit the bug).

Regards,
Yavor

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 02:18, Kristis Makris <mkgnu at mkgnu.net> wrote:
        
        >         If there is a possibility for Bugzilla to raise
        exceptions
        >         inside the
        >         eval {} blocks, is there another way of eliminating
        that
        >         possibility ?
        > I think If we use the WebService API error would be signalled
        in a bit
        > different manner. Another approach would be to patch Bugzilla.
        
        
        I suppose my question is, why are we so fearful that something
        bad will
        happen that will throw an exception ? Can't we simply check the
        return
        values of function calls to see if the calls succeeded ?
        
        

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