Sakai is a complex application built out of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It is inevitable that, even with the most vigorous testing, a few residual bugs will occasionally cause problems for a small minority of end users. This section describes how these issues are found, contained, and reported back.
Sakai has a policy of containment and signaling of issues. When everyone else has failed and there is no way that the application can usefully fulfill the end user's request, then an error form is returned to the end user.
At the top of the form is a space for user comments, and at the bottom is the rather ugly and unreadable stack trace that the underlying code passes on. When an exception is thrown, it starts in a particular method as a part of a Java class. The method might have been called by another method, which in its own turn may also have been called by yet another method. Note that the depth of the stack trace, especially when you...