[CB-4495] start-emulator script doesn't fail (exit) early on fatal emulator errors

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 3.0.0
• Fix Version/s: 3.1.0
• Component/s: cordova-android
• Assignee: Andrew Grieve
• Reporter: Tomaz Muraus
• Created: 03/Aug/13 10:52
• Updated: 23/Aug/18 07:28
• Resolved: 15/Aug/13 15:50

Description

Problem

(https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/77)

Currently start-emulator script doesn't exist early on Linux if a fatal error happens.

This means you need to wait 300 seconds (default timeout) before you receive first feedback from the cli tool that something is wrong. An even then (after a timeout), it's hard to debug the problem because adb stdout and stderr are simply redirected /dev/null. This makes it for a bad UI and a frustrated user.

For example:

....
Waiting for emulator.....
If I run the emulator manually I see it produces a fatal error:

emulator: ERROR: unknown skin name 'WVGA800'
Proposed Solution

This branch does the following:

Modify the emulator start script to redirect log to a temporary file. This way it's easier to debug actual issues.
Modify wait_for_emulator function to exit immediately and print an error if a fatal error is detected while starting the emulator
Example output with my change:

Saving emulator log to: /tmp/tmp.VTOblrPktV

Emulator failed to start, fatal error detected
Error: emulator: ERROR: unknown skin name 'WVGA800'
Full log available at: /tmp/tmp.VTOblrPktV
Exiting...

Github pull request with a patch for the proposed solution is available at https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/77. Once people are pleased with the patch, I'll attach final version to this ticket.