[Sugar-devel] Datastore index corruption!

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2010-07-29 at 07:19 +0100, Gary Martin wrote:
> > Meanwhile, we're working on a work-around that will hopefully fix all
> > problems of this sort: a "Rescan" or "Reindex" item on the Journal
> > palette.
> 
> Unsurprisingly, a massive -1 from me, but you knew that was coming already! ;)

This was quite expected, but I was also hoping to get alternative
suggestions.


> > I can already hear a big objection coming: this sort of geeky stuff has
> > no place in the Sugar UI. True, but I see no alternative until we'll
> > have a 100% reliable datastore that can fix itself in all cases of
> > corruption.
> 
> Never going to happen, keep dreaming if you want, but it will only get better, never perfect. 

Which is why the Repair function ought to be there. My first impulse was
to make it hidden (ctrl-R in the Journal), but the others asked me how
would users get to discover it if it were hidden.

Remedies for OS bugs have historically been hidden: CTRL-ALT-DEL in
DOS/Windows, SHIFT+SHIFT to boot without extensions on System 7...
Overly optimistic engineers thought that users would never need to use
the secret key combos. Yet, somehow, 100% of users end up learning them
merely by word of mouth :-)

Now, if we don't want Sugar users to keep handing down the shell
incantation "rm -rf .sugar", we'd better provide a less drastic remedy
in the UI.

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