[Bioperl-l] Tests involving remote databases

[Sendu Bala]

Chris Fields wrote:
> I'm not sure how Bio::Root::HTTPget deals with errors, but you can  
> test for several conditions when using LWP (success, error, etc) and  
> throw an error accordingly.  So you could possibly test $@ with a  
> regex for the error message, pass/fail tests based on that, followed  
> by skipping further tests.

As I see it, the problem is that for some types response received from 
LWP you can't distinguish between a temporary user-specific network 
issue and a permanent server problem. What codes were received in the 
recent problem cases? 408, 500 and 503 seem ambiguous to me. We could 
certainly fail tests on a 404 though.