[Booki-dev] Reinstalled Booki, now picture uploads don't work

[James Simmons]

Tuukka,

I have been developing software professionally for 32 year, so I DO
have a developer's point of view.  I understand that exception
handling is no fun to write, and when you give an error message to a
user you may not want to give him all the information about an error
for the reasons you mention,  But you have to tell SOMEONE.  At least
write something informative in the logs.

The migration instructions for Booki are the worst I have ever seen.
django-admin shell?  Really?  Spending half an hour trying to figure
out just what value

export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=

should have and giving up because NOTHING makes django-admin happy?

I am not a Django developer but I've been running Linux for 11 years
and have installed a fair amount of software from source.  I have also
spent months writing a book using my home copy of Booki.  Also,
apparently the instructions I managed to put together for installing
Booki are in fact the official instructions for doing it.

It looks like all I really had to do was create a data directory
within the booki directory and copy everything there.  I don't see any
evidence so far that database changes are needed.  I never did get
django-admin shell working.

James Simmons


On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Tuukka Hastrup <Tuukka.Hastrup at iki.fi> wrote:
> 15.06.2011 04:27, James Simmons kirjoitti:
>>
>> When I try to upload a picture I press the Upload button and NOTHING
>> happens.  I am uploading to the default directory for the book, and
>> even when I create a brand new book specifically to test uploading
>> pictures NOTHING happens.  It seems to me that the code is trying to
>> do something it can't, perhaps through no fault of its own, and it
>> just decides to pretend nothing happened.  No log messages, no helpful
>> message boxes, nothing.  If I don't have a permission set or a
>> directory is missing or something like that it should TELL ME.  The
>> exception handling in Booki seems to be nonexistent.
>
> A developer's point of view: The exception handling is not nonexistent but
> it's not close to complete either. Unfortunately, complete exception
> handling and great error messages are one of the most laborous parts of
> software development: anything can go wrong so users seldom encounter the
> same situations. Web sites have it a bit easier with HTTP helping to define
> the interface between the web server and the web browser: even a HTTP status
> code such as 500 Internal Server Error is better than nothing. On the other
> hand, too detailed error messages can reveal confidental information from
> the server to the remote user.
>
> Booki is more a web application than a web site, which adds more
> complications with Javascript code and asynchronous HTTP requests (AJAX)
> that are not normally visible in the web browser.
>
> As a remedy, I can suggest installing the Firebug extension to Firefox. When
> something is not working, you can click the bug icon to open it to look
> under the hood. In the "Console" tab, you can see any Javascript errors and
> all AJAX requests. If requests appear, you can click them to access in tabs
> what was posted to the server and what was the response.
>
>> I don't want to muck around with the database unnecessarily.  So far I
>> haven't lost my book, that is I can reconstruct it somewhere else like
>> Sigil if I have to.
>
> A backup copy of your database is good to have in any case.
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