[Ganglia-developers] gmetad protocol and propagating errors back to the client

[Spike S. <fs...@gm...>]

Hi,

right now when gmetad fails an error is logged and in some cases the
connection to the client interrupted returning invalid XML or in other
cases (item not found or broken request) the entire tree is returned.
This imho is bad behavior and code should be added to inform the
client of the error, but before that's possible it needs to be agreed
how this communication should happen. I'm not really fond of XML or
ganglia's code, but I'd guess adding an ERROR element to the DTD is
possibly a solution. At that point whenever there's an error
root_report_start() should be called at the very least and an error
element added inside. This should also work nicely for the multi-item
per request patch I proposed elsewhere [1] as you'd have an error per
requested element.

If anybody is willing to lend a hand to kickstart the XML definition
(or whatever approach is best) I'd be glad to work on the rest.

thanks

-- 
"Behind every great man there's a great backpack" - B.