Re: [PATCH 2/2] Report better error message in remoteGetUNIXSocket
On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 09:48:10AM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 10:06:38AM +0100, Peter Krempa wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 09:49:56 +0100, Martin Kletzander wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 29, 2023 at 06:33:54PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > >
> > > Can we have the error message include a link to this page?
> > > https://wiki.libvirt.org/Failed_to_connect_to_the_hypervisor.html
> > >
> >
> > I think we could, although I'd be a bit afraid of the precedence which,
> > by itself is not that bad, but keeping the separate document(s) up to
> > date could bite us in the back in a while. I won't go against the idea
> > if others in this discussion are fine with it and we reach a consensus.
>
> There is one precedent case, when backing image brobing fails due to
> mess-up in the format fields, in which case the error links to an
> article in the kbase on proper setup of images.
>
> I suggest that if you want to add a link into the error, the article
> should be kept in the kbase in the main repo instead of the wiki.
>
> The article should probably be also clarified to contain only this case
> and also link perhaps to the page about how to setup daemons to run.
This is a lot of extra work just to fix a bad error message.
Error messages should **always** be actionable. They should, every
single time, tell the user in simple language: What is wrong. How to
fix it.
This is an egregious example of a bad error from libvirt that I see
happening over and over again. Let's just fix it.
The clearest actionable error message for me would be:
Cannot find a socket to connect to, please specify a connection URI.
Would that be OK? It clearly tells the user what to do, and even though
it is not the user experience one might want, it is error-prone when
compared to relying on libvirt to guess the right URI. It's just luck
that people running different hypervisor daemons than virtqemud are not
using tools that use libvirt, but automatically presume QEMU connection.
I know what I suggest is a lot of work for such a simple thing, the same
way as creating and maintaining a page which tells everyone how to start
a system service is. If someone has root access to a machine, can
install packages, but does not know how to start a system service, then
there are better places where to find up to date information than every
single project maintaining a list of distro-specific instructions.
If you don't like that last suggestion above, then I'll rewrite it,
create a kbase article and link to it. No problem. I'm just trying to
find a middle ground here.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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