I've been working on migrating https://messwithdns.net to use PowerDNS as a backend, mostly because there are all kinds of things that I didn’t handle properly in my initial implementation
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I've been working on migrating https://messwithdns.net to use PowerDNS as a backend, mostly because there are all kinds of things that I didn’t handle properly in my initial implementation
But the error messages I get from the API feel a little confusing, for example if I try to add a record when there's already a CNAME there, I get the error "RRset orange.beryl5.messwithdns.com. IN A: Conflicts with pre-existing RRset”
which is _true_, but it doesn't explain what's happening
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I think I'm probably just going to write some code that takes the error responses from the API and translates them into error messages that make more sense in the context I'm showing them in
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@b0rk maybe my brain is just irreparably broken. But this feels like a reasonable error to say "there's already a record here". It's just not meant to be displayed directly to users. I think error translation is always something the user of a tool needs to be responsible for.
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@b0rk or maybe I'm mussing something about what your expectations are. Maybe all I should say is that I don't expect third party APIs to return error text that is suitable for end users.
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@polotek yeah I think you're right!
I guess what threw me off is that the API also doesn't provide error codes either so it's hard to parse the error and translate it, which is what made me think the text was supposed to be suitable for end users
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@paulehoffman @mwl @b0rk Paul I think it's nice that you want to defend your work. But it would be better if you started from a place of acknowledging that what we see in front of us doesn't exactly convey a commitment to user friendliness.
Maybe you can explain more about who works in these things in the project and how you try to improve user-facing experiencing.