From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <40BFCAE3.4060603@chunder.com> Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 11:05:39 +1000 From: Bruce Ellis User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (Windows/20040502) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Error reporting (Was: [9fans] GNU Make) References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 94a2b33a-eacd-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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.''