[icedtea-web] RFC: add support for validating the deployment configuration

[Omair Majid]

On 12/13/2010 02:46 PM, Deepak Bhole wrote:
> * Omair Majid<omajid at redhat.com>  [2010-12-09 16:22]:
>> On 12/09/2010 03:43 PM, Deepak Bhole wrote:
>>> * Omair Majid<omajid at redhat.com>   [2010-12-09 12:12]:
>>> Looks okay to me. Not sure if we should be using a 'default' value
>>> instead though.. what does the reference impl. do?
>>
>> Hm.. good point, I hadnt checked that. I have tried it out now, and
>> here are my observations.
>>
>> I tried adding a few malformed and invalid entries and it seems to
>> run without any problems. I tried using a url as a cache location
>> (which is not allowed) and I did not see any files being cached in
>> the default location. As far as I can see, any invalid entries are
>> silently ignored and some sane value (_not_ necessarily the default
>> value) is substituted instead. In general, even with incorrect
>> properties, javaws works - no error messages, nothing printed to the
>> console and the invalid entries in the properties file are not
>> modified.
>>
>> If you like, I can leave out the part where incorrect values are
>> replaced with default values (after all, everywhere in the code
>> where a configuration is used, it is checked for being valid first)
>> - the rest of the validation is still useful for doing command line
>> and GUI validation and informing the user.
>>
>> The important thing, I suppose, is that we should somehow tell user
>> that something is wrong, but still run all JNLPs and applets.
>>
>
> Agreed. Since the ri does replace it with some value rather than just
> notifying the user, I guess there is no harm in using the default value.
> It'd be nice though if it were made so that the user is made aware that
> the values are wrong, and that default values are being used instead
> (notified via the GUI I mean, for cases where launch is from browser).
>
> That way they can fix it for the next run instead of it continuing to
> use values that the user may not want.
>

If it's all right, I would like to address this in a separate patch. I 
can have a dialog pop up telling the user the error in the 
configuration. I am also working on adding something to the control 
panel to make it show all the problematic settings and where they come from.

Thanks,
Omair