Yet another benefit of transparency, related to ease of debugging, is that transparent systems are easier to perform recovery actions on after a bug bites — and, often, more resistant to damage from bugs in the first place.

In comparing the terminfo database with Windows registries we noted that registries are notoriously subject to being corrupted by buggy application code. This can make the entire system unusable. Even if it doesn't, recovery can be difficult if the corruption confuses the specialized registry-editing tools.

Our Unix case studies illustrate ways that designing for transparency can prevent this class of problem. Because the terminfo database is not one big file, botching one terminfo entry does not make the whole terminfo data set unusable. Fully textual one-big-file formats like termcap are usually parsed with methods which (unlike block reads of binary structure dumps) can recover from single-point errors. Syntax errors in an SNG file can be corrected by hand without requiring specialized editors that might refuse to load a damaged PNG image.

Going back to the kmail case study, that program makes fault diagnosis easier because it obeys the Rule of Repair: SMTP failures are noisy, usefully so. You don't have to decode a layer of obfuscatory messages generated by kmail itself to see what the interaction with the SMTP server looks like. All you have to do is look in the right place, because kmail is being transparent and not throwing away information about the error state. (It helps that SMTP itself is textual and includes human-readable status messages in its transactions.)

Discoverability tools like textualizers and browsers also make fault diagnosis easier. We've already touched on one reason: they make inspecting the state of the system easier. But there is another effect at work as well; textualized versions of data tend to have useful redundancies (such as using whitespace for visual separation as well as explicit delimiters for parsing). These are present to make them easier to read for humans, but also have the effect of making them more resistant to being irreparably trashed by point failures. A corrupted chunk in a PNG file is seldom recoverable, but the human capacity for pattern recognition and reasoning from context might be able to repair the equivalent SNG form.

Over and over again, the Rule of Robustness is clear. Simplicity plus transparency lowers costs, reduces everybody's stress, and frees people to concentrate on new problems rather than cleaning up after old mistakes.