[itsdb] Re: "mysterious" problem importing test items

[Emily M. Bender]

And just a follow-up on this earlier message:  The `mysterious'
problem was made even more mysterious for my students (novice users)
because that error message only stayed in the dialog window for about
10 seconds.  Since a novice user wouldn't necessarily suspect that
successful completion of the action would add something to the
database list, it might appear that all was functioning normally.

Emily

On Wed, Apr 13, 2005 at 04:07:07PM -0700, Emily M. Bender wrote:
> 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