Packman and source availability

As noted in Paolo’s post in Announcements yesterday, there is an issue with Packman when a selected source becomes unavailable for whatever reason. It causes Packman to stop updating the lists with an error box for a 503 error. It won’t go past that onto the next source, and it doesn’t detail the source URL it is not finding.

Currently you have to copy each enabled source URL into a browser to find out which is the failing one then disable it and rescan. I would suggest that a change is made to show the source URL in the error box, and also to allow Packman to continue to the next source once the error message is cleared.

and also to allow Packman to continue to the next source once the error message is cleared.

That would make sense. One shouldn’t assume 100% server availability.

It’s a bit like the Android default mail client. Connectivity issue? Tell the user that the password was wrong and pop up the password entry dialogue. <facepalm>
(I mean, mobile phones, 3G, patchy rural coverage, what could possibly go wrong? ;) )

I would suggest that a change is made to show the source URL in the error box

+1 for displaying the URL that has failed. :)

and also to allow Packman to continue to the next source once the error message is cleared.

This, maybe, require a bit more thoughts, IMHO. For instance, there might be items in repository A which have dependecies offered by repository B, which, if unavailable, can cause troubles during installation of items in repository A (that is reachable).

PackMan can signal this, but, again, it will show just a generic error with something on the line of “failed download”, which may make debugging difficult.

However, this is an advice for everyone: When you have problems with PackMan, try to enable the log feature (!PackMan iconbar icon Menu → Advanced → Logs).

This will give you more info than the error box generally does, so it may be very useful in the meanwhile (and if) Allan decides to improve the 503 error message box.

Hope this helps,