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Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 23:53:21 +0100
From: Ross Gardler <rgardler@apache.org>
Organization: OSS Watch
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To: dev@forrest.apache.org
Subject: Re: [headsup] recent change in broken link handling
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David Crossley wrote:
> Ross Gardler wrote:

...

>> 1) revert the error handling which will give us meaningless locationmap 
>> errors, but will give a meaningful broken-links.xml file
>>
>> 2) Improve the generated error page to be more user friendly and show 
>> the error in a graceful way, this will make the user experience better 
>> if a broken site is deployed, but will make the admins job harder
>>
>> 3) A mix of 1) and 2) in which we generate a nice user error page and we 
>> use the SourceWritingTransformer to provide meaningful output for the admin.
>>
>> 4) ?
>>
>> Thoughts?
> 
> Dunno.
> 
> Better locationmap error messages are more important,
> because that can be complex to debug.

As others have noted, I personally feel that broken-links.xml is more 
important. The locationmap can be debugged if you know what you are 
doing. So this will become a user support issue until we can patch the 
locationmap (see my reply to Thorsten).

> Perhaps a way out for now is to describe the issue
> in Jira, add a note to the upgrading_08.html doc, and
> add to the end of the "site" ant target to scan the
> build directory to list any error_site_* files.
 >
> That is not as good as the previous broken link handling
> because it doesn't list the referring pages.

Which, for me is very important.

I've just commented out the relevant match in our root sitemap to 
restore the old behaviour before the code freeze. I think we ought to 
document the bad locationmap error message in the upgrading doc, along 
with a hint on debugging via the locationmap logs (set the log level to 
debug in logkit.xml), and a pointer to the mail lists for assistance. 
(for now I've put a one line warning, better than nothing but needs 
improving since reading the locationmap logs is not easy - I'm going to 
bed now, sorry)

If someone manages to change the way the locationmap works and get it to 
throw a proper error before the code freeze then we can reinstate the 
error trapping. Otherwise we'll do it in the next release (which will 
not be so long in the making - we can discuss that after the release).

Ross