Uninformative error messages

[Max TenEyck Woodbury]

I've just finished tracing down a rather stupid error on my part. It should
have been easy to fix, but it wasn't because the messages that described
the problem in the log files were much more cryptic than they should have
been. Specifically, to decipher the problem I had to grab the source tarbal,
unpack it, find the line that generated the message and finally identify
what was going wrong from the comments that described the function of the
routine that generated the message. A small amount of additional text would
have saved me almost a week of elapsed time. (Setting up the space to put
the tarbal, which was a project I was going to do eventually, took much
longer than I expected.)