[itsdb] "mysterious" problem importing test items

[Emily M. Bender]

Hi,

I'm having my students use the fine system in my
multilingual grammar engineering course this year.
They're quite excited about the functionality it
offers.  In working out how to tell them to set it
up, I ran across a `mysterious' problem.  It seems
that if the Skeleton Root is set to a directory with
an Index.lisp file with no entries (or, alternatively,
an Index.lisp file with one entry that does not
correspond to an existing directory), a `mysterious'
error appears.  That is, the fine system reports
"mysterious problem creating `import6'".

>From this, I gather that the function called by
this podium action checks the validity of the Skeleton
Root more thoroughly than the Options > Skeleton Root
operation does.  A more helpful error message would
be nice, though.  (I'm also curious why the import
function would need to check the validity of the skeleton
root.)

While I'm here, I'd like to suggest that when
the fine system fails to create a test suite instance
that it clean up the top level directory it does
create.  (In trying to figure out the work around
for this, I kept running into the directory exists
error...)

Thanks,
Emily