Dabo in 30 seconds?

[David Cuthbert]

Ed Leafe wrote:
>  Should we have defensive code for every possible broken installation? We use 
> a lot of the Python standard library modules, many dbapi-compliant modules, 
> and, of course, wxPython. If someone mis-installs one of the pre-requisites, 
> do you expect Dabo to catch that and present you with a diagnostic message? 
> I'm serious here: I want to know what people consider acceptable for a 
> software package that relies on other packages.

Every possible broken installation != checking for missing dependencies.

It can be difficult/cumbersome/result in code bloat to constantly check 
for module A, feature B enabled in module C, etc.  Further, you're 
certainly going to miss some at first.  But as bug reports come in (like 
this one), add them to a list of checks performed in a checkconfig 
script.  This script can be run at installation and/or by the user when 
something like this goes wrong.

You could also have checkconfig print out useful features about the 
environment it's running in to help make bug reports better.

Building something like this takes time, but every minute spent on it 
now is 10-20 minutes saved in handling the same old bug report in the 
future.