[Swift-devel] Re: [Swift-user] Resending: I/O errors in swift script

[Mihael Hategan]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 15:21 +0000, Ben Clifford wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, Mihael Hategan wrote:
> 
> > Or, perhaps, the information about the workflow should be organized
> > better, using interfaces more intuitive than endless streams of loosely
> > structured text, so that the user can, interactively, explore the
> > various details of what has happened.
> 
> Getting enough structure into log messages to facilitate this is probably 
> something that could be looked at at the same time as looking at CEDPS 
> logging stuff.

The question is whether the information is there. I think some level of
parsing needs to be done. I don't find parsing current logs to be that
difficult of a task. The semantic level and the representation level are
however, in my view, far more difficult. Which is why I'm reluctant to
spending a lot of effort on something that doesn't help much, yet it
makes logs relatively unreadable. There's little to gain, and a little
more to lose.

I don't mind a unified/standardized logging format. But the one coming
from CEDPS seems overly restrictive and unreadable. Not to mention that
the tools needed to implement it are lacking. I'm assuming sooner or
later, it will be adopted, maybe simply because Ian says so a sufficient
number of times. In the mean time, it would be lovely if the people that
came up with it would be more reasonable in terms of supporting things
that don't fit in their narrow scope. But that doesn't seem to be the
case.

> 
> > Now, there's retries and there's lazy errors (compute everything that's
> > possible and only stop after nothing more can be done). You can disable
> > that. swift -help. I think it's -lazy.errors=false.
> 
> One thing that I find particularly unhelpful about the output in lazy 
> errors mode is that this:
> 
> 1. Application reslice not executed due to errors in dependencies (4 
> times)
> 
> gets reported as the same kind of error as this:
> 
> 3. Application "align_warp" failed (File not found: 
> /Users/benc/work/fmri-tutorial/swift/Raw/anatomy0004.img)
> 
> so people have to learn to ignore the dependecy errors.
> 
> It might be useful to turn off lazy errors by default.

That means the workflow will fail on the first error. Anyway, the option
is in swift.properties.

> 
> It also might be useful to change the output formatting so dependency 
> errors like this don't count as errors - either not reported at all or 
> reported in some different way.

Well, take your pick. Give me something. I don't have any particular
ideas on the "make it better" front.

>