Do people actually believe these dot points or are they just out of scope for most applications to tackle beyond letting the user try again?

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chasil 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I have had a developer with anger issues expect 100% success with FTP file transfers, and anything that failed was 100% my fault as a Linux/Oracle administrator.

These FTP sessions were running over WANs connecting Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Tennessee.

I ended up writing him an "until curl ftp://...; do echo it failed again; done" loop which calmed that particular issue down.

I don't miss that guy, not even 1%. Good riddance.

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rusk 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perfect demonstration of the fallacies in action! If you were used to developing applications on a self contained platform you would think something like “sure, if it fails the user can try again”

On a distributed system the user can only try again if the platform has remained stable, the failure is transient (*) and they have (crucially) have been given the information to retry.

The platform that provides a stable environment for the user to just try again has been built on these principles.

(*) there is one administrator assumes it is within the user’s power to resolve the issue

	▲	Nicook 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>we'll just add this feature on as some async verification since it takes a while, then make the original update wait in some weird state for it to finish. Later, when users are confused at failures and weird states. >ok now lets build a new system that tries to gather all this information on updates in "weird states" and let users fix them! simplified example, but nightmare.