Sometimes, a compiler might not be available - maybe it's on a remote mount that keeps getting umounted by a server administrator (it does happen!), or, if act-tester ever gets SSH connection retry support (#72), maybe the compile was taken down by a failing SSH connection.
In these cases, we could filter the error (eg, a regexp on command not found to catch missing bits of scripts, and a catch on the particular error otherwise), but it would be more helpful to have a way of specifying that a compiler was unreachable (or, maybe, just 'transient failure') - this would help us know that it was a bit more severe than 'we know this is going to happen' but not severe enough to worry about until and unless it stacks up.
This meshes with #68, as it's a specific example of more information the status system could be telling us.
Sometimes, a compiler might not be available - maybe it's on a remote mount that keeps getting umounted by a server administrator (it does happen!), or, if act-tester ever gets SSH connection retry support (#72), maybe the compile was taken down by a failing SSH connection.
In these cases, we could filter the error (eg, a regexp on
command not foundto catch missing bits of scripts, and a catch on the particular error otherwise), but it would be more helpful to have a way of specifying that a compiler was unreachable (or, maybe, just 'transient failure') - this would help us know that it was a bit more severe than 'we know this is going to happen' but not severe enough to worry about until and unless it stacks up.This meshes with #68, as it's a specific example of more information the status system could be telling us.