Re: Error reporting (Was: [9fans] GNU Make)

[Bruce Ellis <brucee@chunder.com>]

I can't believe there are so many messages about this.
Plan9 error messages should be as informative, precise,
and *user readable* as possible without being too chatty.
The "bind" example is a good one and made me smile when
I first encountered the new one.  The kernel and most
filesystems do this well - and where they don't they
should be fixed.

I have no problems with someone spending a lot of time
coercing APE into behaving in a way they consider "more
correct" - it doesn't effect me.  I won't change all my
error messages to make this endless tweaking easier.

And rog's code has a race that has been known for at
least 25 years.

As for internationalization a simple library function
that smashes the %r message at the ":"s (observing
quoting) and "tries" to map the phrases would produce
satisfactory results in most cases, and when it can't
then the error message is buggered or unknown and
either the originator of the message or the mapper
should be fixed.

By "simple" I don't mean "not labourious"; consider

% ls -l /tmp/pus $home/pus
ls: /tmp/pus: '/tmp/pus' directory entry not found
ls: /usr/brucee/pus: '/usr/brucee/pus' does not exist

(/tmp is kfs, /usr/brucee is fossil)

Enough, I should be writing code.

brucee

Charles Forsyth wrote:

>>>i can't believe that dross is still around.
> 
> 
> ``no dear, this is the dream.  you're still back in the cell.''