Uninformative error messages

[Gerald Carter]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2002, Max TenEyck Woodbury wrote:

> 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.)
> 
> From the looks of nearby code, there are LOTS of other error messages
> that are as bad or worse. Is anybody planning on cleaning up this
> problem?

What error message?  Kind of hard to give any feedback without 
any specifics.



cheers, jerry
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Hewlett-Packard                                     http://www.hp.com
 SAMBA Team                                       http://www.samba.org
 --                                            http://www.plainjoe.org
 "Sam's Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours" 2ed.      ISBN 0-672-32269-2
 --"I never saved anything for the swim back." Ethan Hawk in Gattaca--