exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I'm not a programmer so if what I'm about to ask is borderline (or completely) ridiculous,
I beg pardon... :wink:

Let's say you have an AUTO folder program that's going to...hook into something, or even
better, install a driver to some add-on hardware that's not part of the original ST design.

The program "knows" when it's successful and reports it via a short message during boot-up.
It also knows when it fails and reports that as well.

My question is, could a programmer tell that software to, upon receipt of a failed message,
run itself again until it gets a "success!" message and then continue on in the boot up process?

Is that even remotely possible?

Thanks all.

I think it'd have to be written into the program itself, which would mean the sources need to be available. Also it'd probably be a bad idea for it to do it indefinitely, otherwise it might completely stop the machine booting.

The software could internally re-try before giving up - but that isn't a normal thing to need to do except for something like storage devices where there could be a spin-up or setup delay that can't be predicted - and software made to talk to those devices know all about that.

So if a driver PRG quits with an error on the first try but works on a second try, the program is not expecting to fail - it points to an ordering conflict or a deeper problem somewhere and it would be better to figure that out with the provider of the HW/SW.

Lots of AUTO programs will edit/append the cookie chain so its possible a bug in one of them could fail on a first try or cause another program to fail if it is done incorrectly, otherwise failing to get a response from hardware could be a sign of hardware issues.

I'm not a programmer, so I'll take it from a different perspective.

What happens if it fails and ends up in a loop and only a reboot will get you out of it?

If you want that kind of behaviour then you ideally need some sort of escape route and I know that it'll be possible to skip whatever causes the issue on reboot if you need to, but is that convenient?

Also how would it potentially interact with other AUTO programs?

First of all, thanks everyone for answers/input.

But that's exactly what I am seeing in a certain AUTO folder program (I had previously
thought it was fixed but the same behavior resumed and I was loathe to report it
because I figured people were tired of hearing about it - especially since I seem to
be the one and only one experiencing the issue). Hence, my question.

Currently, I have it set to run -5- times in the AUTO folder, renaming it "Filename1.prg,
Filename2" etc., with 2 entries before when Xboot runs and 3 after.

I have Xboot set so I have 2 boot up listings. One listing is for whenever one of the five
instances succeeds, then I boot up without further effort. If it fails those first 2 attempts,
then I have a "failed" listing where the last 3 instances are run again, successively. Doing
this, I usually will get to the desktop with at least 1 instance working correctly.

I was looking for a more elegant solution... :(

Over at Atari-Forum, one suggestion was to build a "loop" into the program itself.

Thanks all.

As far as I can tell, this has been resolved (again). Moulinaie was kind enough
to do a solution and (again, so far) it seems to be working.

So...short answer to the long-winded question I asked at the start of this thread
is, "yes". :)