Bugzilla – Bug 2871
Need to warn users of broken plugins after upgrade
Last modified: 2011-07-22 03:45:00 UTC
The upgrade from 6.2 to 6.5 requires new versions of LazySearch and AlienBBC - if you don't upgrade these the slimserver crashes. Only by running it from a command line are you likely to see the cause, and not necessarily even then. For non-technical users, this will cause major problems. Ideally, slimserver should warn of plugins that need upgrading and disable them to prevent crashes. Could plugins carry some sort of version-certification that the server could query for this?
They do. But, as is always said on this: it cannot cover everything that a plugin might try to do.
what exactly is this crash? event viewer/log please. Only report I've seen in forum is that the plugin disappears from the plugin list, which is one of the safety measures already in place: not loading a plugin that doesn't pass the simple checks. running slim.exe --d_plugins isn't all that hard, but it might be a good improvement if the plugin failures were dumped to a log always, regardless of debug switches. Of course, this will still not be able to stop a plugin from simply making a bad function call. Every effort is made to provide notices for deprecated function calls, and plenty of warning to developers to upgrade. If there is a stub we can fix, then the log entry for the crash will point to it.
unfortunately i don't have the log for the lazysearch problem nor time to roll back and reproduce. as far as i remember the server crashed soon after starting. starting ss from the command line showed an error that mentioned lazy so i removed the lazysearch folder and all was fine alienbbc: see bug 2868 for trace. installing the new alienbbc solved this - but even with the trace i didn't realise it was due to alien and needed your prompting my thinking is that plugins such as alien are such a strong selling point (radio-on-demand in your living room - a first!) that slimserver needs to make upgrades seamless for non-techies. i can appreciate the tech difficulties but i believe it's an important part of making slim a long-term success
Quite agreed, Ben - we need better user feedback in a lot of areas. This isn't going to make 6.5 though.
The new plugin handler should be able to warn the user about plugins requiring updates.