Draupnir fails to start up at all when can't join a policy list or protected room

[julianfoad]

PolicyListManager.start() hard-fails and prevents Draupnir start-up, when it tries to join each watched and protected room, if it fails to join any of the rooms.

I understand this is by design, in its basic form: because we don't want Draupnir taking drastic actions (like banning) based on missing info.

This happened to me when I thought I'll just delete this unwanted empty policy-list room in synadm but it was still listed in the bot's account data.

In the management room I got only the generic message, "‼ | Startup failed due to error - see console". (As I'm running it as a developer I can see the console logs, but I'm thinking someone other than the developer/installer/sysadmin will run into this sooner or later.)

Work-around:

• manually edit the bot's matrix account data to remove the references to the nonexistent room. (In org.matrix.mjolnir.watched_lists and/or org.matrix.mjolnir.protected_rooms.)

Desired behaviour (minimal):

• Log a more specific diagnostic in the management room.

Desired behaviour (optimal, "stretch goal"):

• start-up continues, recording the failure states;
• Draupnir is put into "dry-run" mode as we don't want it taking actions based on missing info;
• the failure to join one or more rooms is noted and made clear to the moderator (in the admin room);
• moderator is able to use normal Draupnir commands to see which room(s) it failed to join, to delete those room(s) from its watching/protecting lists, and/or add replacement room(s);
• moderator is able to tell Draupnir to check everything is OK now and switch out of "dry-run" mode.

I acknowledge the latter may be too big, too much work to take on at this stage, but wanted to write it down anyway.

[Gnuxie]

This is now fixed in v2.0.0-beta.7

We're collecting feedback on safe mode at the moment and are now focusing system administration related startup woes.

See the-draupnir-project/planning#1