[Dextrose] [Sugar-devel] Datastore index corruption!

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 17:45 +0100, Gary Martin wrote:

> OK... Here's a horrible kludge, but I think it's less of a horrible
> kludge than placing a big 'click this if you think random s##t has
> happened' button in one of our primary UIs.
> 
> Make a new control panel for such admin/maintenance actions, FWIW to
> set the scene, in other OSs I'd imagine this as part of some sort of
> manual disk fix, validate, repair, check, backup, tool. So let's say
> we have a new cog icon CP module, there is now plenty of space in
> there to add some sane explanatory text, and a clear text button. It
> would set a flag, and then reboot the the machine with the usual
> dialogue as per some other CP modules, rebuild of index would then be
> done at boot time (so you don't cause even more of a problem as random
> open activities die and possibly loose users work). Deployments can
> then choose to include this CP module in their build or not, and I'd
> guess it stands a better chance of getting upstreamed.

I feel that the control panel has already become packed with all sort of
weird options that users tweak and then forget about.

Having half of the networking options in the control panel rather than
in the network neighborhood view is quite unintuitive. There's a battery
device icon on the frame, yet the power management settings are in the
control panel.

It seems that the practice of throwing everything in the control panel
has become a shortcut not doing proper UI design. We used to have a nice
spacial philosophy in which objects are represented by icons and
commands to manipulate them could be found next to them.

Now we have the concept such as the schoolserver which is invisible in
the UI and can be manipulated from the buddy menu and from the network
control panel. Yuck.

For


> I'd still much rather see the effort go into addressing the actual
> underlying issue, but you did ask for suggestions ;)

This is also being worked on, but don't expect all issues with the
datastore to be fixed in less than 5 years. Especially on jffs2 and on
the cheap microSD cards that ship with the XO-1.5. We must expect
corruption that can't be fixed just by clever algorithms.

For how long did MacOS ship with a hidden "repair desktop" function? Now
it's gone, but only because the desktop file is also gone :-)

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/