gitpod-io / gitpod-io/gitpod

Improve prebuild status messages including errors on the prebuild page

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#9,111 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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feature: prebuilds meta: never-stale team: webapp type: improvement
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
17h 58m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

Description

Problem to solve

Back in https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/pull/8805, we improved the prebuild page (with logs and status) so that workspace instance status is used and prebuild status is reflected more accurately.

See also relevant issues:

Re-posting a comment from @easyCZ in https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/pull/8805#issuecomment-1081718220:

My intention for follow-up PRs is to clean-up the errors the server provides such that we treat them as "publicly facing errors" and include actionable feedback.

Some errors include also duplicate information that shows up on the status as well as inside the prebuild logs, see relevant comment in https://github.com/gitpod-io/gitpod/pull/8805#discussion_r837316450.

Frame 369
Proposal

To this extend, some error messages could be rephrased to look less scary or technical for users while providing full context of the error when possible. See relevant comments:

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing PR #8805 and its referenced discussion comments, then compare the related issues #5611, #7384, and #8197 with the current prebuild page behavior. Done means the page presents less technical, actionable error messages with full context where possible and avoids duplicating information already shown in the logs or status.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
developer-experience, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
28/100

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