midtoad's blog

Hiccups on start-up of this Frog blog

Not quite a bug report, but a definite gotcha for me...

I installed a new FrogComplete 1.7 package and the server started up right out of the box, with no edits anywhere. Great! That's a fundamentally important behaviour if you want to capture new users. One small hitch, when I added 'frog' to the URL, I got a 404. (i.e. http://domain.name:9080/frog). It was thanks to earlier discussion on this list that I remembered that the trailing slash is needed, and then I got in. But that would have tripped a new user, I think.

Next I went to the admin login page so I could create a new user. But as I did so, I recalled that I should edit the default admin name & password to something less obvious, so I stopped the server and edited __init__.py. I inserted my own admin user name, password, and person name, and also updated the mail contact info. When I tried to start the server again after this edit, it wouldn't start. After several attempts to solve the problem, including returning the data to the default, and looking in the logs for debug clues, I gave up and reinstalled FrogComplete. This time, I made only one edit in the __init__.py: the admin name & password. Same result: the server wouldn't start.

After some further thought, I have an explanation: the editor that I was using (nano, on unslung linux) was doing a hard word wrap. That is, when the line containing the admin info scrolled off the screen, it wrapped that line by inserted a carriage return. When I saved the file, since it's a Python script, that hard CR causes the second half of the line to create a Python syntax error, and the server is throwing an exception and dying; well, it never actually lives, so I guess it doesn't technically die. :-) When I checked the logs, there is only a terse ERROR statement saying that the server didn't start due to an error. Well yes, but what kind of error?

Since I'm doing some development in Python, I was able to catch the problem, but users who don't know Python would get caught up on this one for sure. So here's my suggestion: if the server fails to start, or crashes while running, due to some exception in the Python code, please give us a hint in the debug log. That way, less technical users will be able to file more descriptive notes on the discussion list, and more technical users will be able to help squash bugs - and I love squashing bugs! :-)