14 Sep
2017
14 Sep
'17
9:54 p.m.
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):
* <program aborts, leaving the world in an unknown state>
* "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 <link> 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.