Error Handling

I need to implement error handling within Puppet. At this point, errors are largely handled internally and always the same way, which is probably not what most people want. Even if it is okay to make everything consistent, it is probably a good idea to rethink and revamp error handling as it exists now.

In particular, I don't have a clear idea of how to deal with part of a system failing. If a single state fails, either at initialization or run time, should the whole object fail? If a single object in a dependency tree fails, what should the rest of the tree to?

I've been thinking about these questions for a while, and I don't really have a clear answer. It seems like errors are generally an indication of a misconfiguration, so it would make sense to fail the whole object and require a reconfiguration, but I'm not sure that's really the best option.

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 | Tags: puppet, errors, design