[Chandler-dev] Proposal for a startup-options dialog

[Heikki Toivonen]

Andi Vajda wrote:
> I recently had a similar debate with Heikki about this. While having a
> goal of no repository failures or chandler bugs in general is a laudable
> one, preventing one from recovering from a failure when it happens is
> shooting oneself in the foot.

We discussed the need of shipping command line db utility executables by
default. Ok for now, but not in the long run.

> I sure don't want anyone to complain that Chandler sucks hugely because
> we removed all the recovery facilities just because "they should never
> be needed".

You are ignoring the rest of what we discussed. We should have Chandler
automatically recover everything that can be automatically recovered.
And for the cases where user needs to make a decision, put up some
helpful startup dialog along the lines Bryan suggested below. Further, a
situation where a user interaction is required should be extremely rare.

Finally, we shouldn't ship utility/functionality in the default
installers that, say, one in a million would find useful. It is
perfectly ok to create some optional power user utilities and have them
as separate downloads. And I said if nothing else, I'll do those myself
by hand if needed.

> On Mon, 15 May 2006, Bryan Stearns wrote:
>> I propose we add a mechanism to put up a dialog on startup if the user
>> is holding down a metakey (to be named later; we can figure one out
>> that works on all platforms and doesn't interfere with basic
>> application launching); this dialog would offer this radio-group of
>> choices;

I agree this dialog would be useful. However, I disagree with the
metakey for a few reasons:

- it is not discoverable
- it might be a problem with accessibility, but I don't really know for sure
- I think we should consider automatically discovering UI data problem
and resetting it (or just automatically resetting in case of an unknown
problem)

I propose that we just put up the dialog automatically when we
encountered problems during startup.

-- 
  Heikki Toivonen

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