[Yum] exception handling regarding yum plugins

[Hannes Frederic Sowa]

On Sat, Aug 7, 2010 at 8:04 PM, seth vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> I'll be blunt, though - you'll need some kind of client-authenticated
> system to push this data to a common server. In order to keep any client
> on the system from being able to fill your server with garbage data.
>
> A couple of options:
>
> 1. reverse it and have a client connect in and fetch the data at regular
> intervals

It's done like that. I have custom data fetching scripts and just
tried to reformat
the information with a yum-plugin (in a single json-stream which gets collected
by some perl-scripts). I abandoned that and now query the history database
directly. Perhaps auditing was the wrong word for that. I better call it an
enhanced central package log. :)


> 2. look at something like func to do the communication.

Would be a better start but I already had some infrastructure for data
collection.

> I agree with as far as exceptions go - we can improve those and if you
> see cases, I think that's a fair thing to do. But at some points a
> plugin can just go horribly wrong and call sys.exit()  or a library can
> abort and then you're just hosed.

For one, trying to develop a yum-plugin with my low python skills, knowing
not to create inconsistencies in the database when doing something dumb,
is a good thing, I think. :)

Also, if plugins are doing network-IO and dependent servers are currently
not available this should not abort the yum transaction, if the plugin does
not handle that correctly.

hannes