Receptor prints Python tracebacks when it ought to print human-friendly error messages

[elyezer]

Receptor prints Python tracebacks when it ought to print human-friendly error messages

[ghjm]

There are several related problems here.

The reason "receptor status" failed is that it has to start an ephemeral node to communicate with the Receptor mesh (problem 1), so it tried to store its manifest data under /var/lib/receptor, and did not have permission to to so (problem 2). After this failure, it printed a traceback instead of a nicely-formatted error message (problem 3), and while it was doing this, the exception handler itself generated another exception (problem 4), which was then printed as a traceback instead of a nicely-formatted error message (problem 3 again).

Taking these problems one at a time:

• Problem 1 will be solved if and when ansible/receptor#208 is implemented. Until then, we just have to live with ephemeral nodes.
• Problem 2 can be solved by giving your uid access to /var/lib/receptor, passing a -d /whatever/dir argument, or by editing /etc/receptor/receptor.conf to specify a different directory (I use /tmp/receptor).
• Problem 3 probably requires a top-down rethink of how we handle error conditions in Receptor, or if we can't get that done, maybe at least a global exception handler with better default behavior. Also, I'll just mention that the whole concept of exception handling in Python asyncio in general, and Receptor in particular, is a maze of twisty little passages, all different.
• Problem 4 can probably be fixed by putting the Controller constructor call outside the try..finally block in entrypoints.py.

@elyezer, can you clarify which of these problems you mean for this issue card to track?

[elyezer]

@ghjm it seems that problem 3, maybe also 4, would be a great candidate here. Usually it is not a great experience to try things and get all these stacktraces as the output.

About problem 2, we have a separate issue ansible/receptor#195.

[ghjm]

@elyezer That's great, I hadn't seen #195 and we do need an issue to track problem 3. Can you edit the title of this to something like "Receptor prints Python tracebacks when it ought to print human-friendly error messages" ?

[elyezer]

@ghjm sure thing, I will edit a bit the description to reflect the intents here.