detect errors and give information about possible causes
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
pastebinit |
Triaged
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned | ||
pastebinit (Debian) |
Confirmed
|
Unknown
|
Bug Description
many users are confused when pastebinit silently fails which actually happens fairly frequently. paste.debian.net is more finicky because the maintainers there have a number of (plausible) rules of what they consider an acceptable paste. The problem is the lack of a feedback channel from the web service through pastebinit to the user. Eventually pastebinit should have proper error handling, but until that is implemented and in the spirit of the 80/20 rule I suggest the following.
1) detects if there is no valid (AKA empty) pasteid, meaning an error of some sort has occured
2) Instead of simply giving the user the pastebin baseurl pastebinit fails and gives an explanation of known causes
For paste.debian.net these are
a) either the file has only 1 line (it works with 2 lines or more)
b) or the document is too big (>153599 bytes )
c) or the username is >10 characters
Setting to High priority because of the number of reports we get for this and the potential to confuse our users.
description: | updated |
Changed in pastebinit (Debian): | |
status: | Unknown → Confirmed |
Step1) :
detects if there is no valid (AKA empty) pasteid, meaning an error of some sort has occurred. --> In this case, pastebinit should return an error code (eg FAILURE='exit 1', SUCCESS='exit 0'), so that it can be easily read by other programs (eg Boot-Repair) that need to know if Pastebinit failed or not, but which don't need more details about why it failed. IMO, this can be implemented in a first step (before Step2 below).
Step2):
instead of simply giving the user the pastebin baseurl pastebinit fails and gives an explanation of known causes --> we found 3 rules for Debian.paste, but these rules may change, and the rules may be different with other pastebins. So this is IMO a good idea, but it may take time to discover all the rules of each pastebin, and we may need to check&update the rules regularly in the future.