Graceful Downtime

Occasionally, services need to go down for some reason or another. That's just a thing that happens. Servers need software updates too, but what happens to the clients that need those services? Well, luckily we've got these HTTP Status responses, and one of those is the 503 response, which is described as meaning "Service Unavailable". The actual English interpretation of that is more akin to temporarily unavailable, and even better, if it is also paired with a "Retry-After" header, with a time sometime in the near-ish future, then we can reasonably assume that that what's happening is an expected downtime, or maintenance.

As of 5.84, KNewStuff will handle that on the various services it supports, and in particular the KDE Store (since that is accessed through the Attica library, which also got a bit of attention to allow for this introspection to be done).

What if error, but helpful?!

It's a small thing, but it means a lot to our users that they don't just sit there staring at something and then get a "lol it's broken" type message, when in fact we do know better what is going on. A side effect of putting in this bit of infrastructure in the library also means we now have somewhere to deal with other unfortunate networking situations in a more graceful manner - not done yet, of course, but we've got a starting point for it.

Just a little one this time, but i thought it was worth mentioning none the less. Not everything has to be huge or groundbreaking, sometimes "this little thing is nice for our users" is also good ;)

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The word of the day is: Failure. Because that's something we have to deal with sometimes :)