From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: usotsuki@buric.co (Steve Nickolas) Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2017 15:54:19 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, 14 Sep 2017, Steve Johnson wrote: > I'm not aware of any profanity per se in the early Unix sources, but > there certainly were some snarky error messages.   Like "eh?"   Or > "Very Funny".  I contributed a few: "gummy structure". > > I've become truly PO'd at the state of error messages in today's > software.   Things like "file error" or "cannot open file" without > telling you what file was being opened.   And every encounter with > git gives me additional fodder.  The information in many of git's > error messages is roughly one bit, that is best translated with > profanity. > > I wrote a paper on error messages at one point.  I had examples from > bad to best.  In a nutshell (worst to best): > > * > * "internal error",  "beta table overflow", "operation failed" > * "Writing the output file failed" > * "File xxx could not be opened for writing." > * "File xxx could not be opened for writing: check the file location > and permissions" > > * "Writing the output file xxx caused an error.  See for > possible reasons and corrections" > > Most git messages fall between 2 and 3.  But there are occasional 4's > and 5's. > > Steve You got perror(), use it (not you)... >_> All my code that outputs error messages for stuff in the C library uses perror(), so a typical error might be "foo: cannot open file bar: No such file or directory", with the last part coming from the C runtime itself. -uso.