Re: Re: Error reporting capabilities for libxc

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 04:14:59PM -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Ian Pratt wrote:
> >Would we be better off returning an error code and a set of parameters,
> >requiring a call-back into the library to get the string? 
> >
> >It's worth thinking about future language localisation here too.
> >  
> 
> I know it's a bigger patch, but the Right Thing to do here is to just 
> propagate an error code through the libxc functions.
> 
> The whole xc_{get,set}_error() is a cludge.  Threading wouldn't be a 
> problem if we returned proper error codes.

This would be an insufficient level of detail compared to my patch. An error
code alone can tell you there was an invalid kernel, or even particular tests
which failed. It can *not* tell you that when the architecture mis-matched,
the expected arch was 'i386' and the actual arch was 'x86_64'. Hence why
I provided both an error code & a detailed message. 

Notice in the following there are two strings - 'Invalid kernel' is the
string associated with the error code 'XC_INVALID_KERNEL'. This is the
generic static mapping. The second string though is dynamically generated
according to the specific metadata which was incorrect - this is the 
invaluable user facing information which cuts down on debugging pain.

[root@dhcp-4-245 ~]# xm create crash
Using config file "/etc/xen/crash".
Error: [2, 'Invalid kernel', "Kernel ELF architecture '3' does not match Xen architecture '62' (x86_64)"]
[root@dhcp-4-245 ~]# xm create crash
Using config file "/etc/xen/crash".
Error: [2, 'Invalid kernel', "Kernel ELF type '3' does not match Xen type '2'"]
[root@dhcp-4-245 ~]# xm create crash
Using config file "/etc/xen/crash".
Error: [2, 'Invalid kernel', 'Not a valid ELF or raw kernel image']

Dan.
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