Re: [PATCH] Don't bother end users about HTTP requests

On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 10:17:46AM -0500, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Now that there are search engines, it's possibly an argument for
> including the error code itself in error messages (even though that's
> always been held up as one of those ridiculous things engineers do
> that users hate). So:
>
> "Commit failed due to blah blah blah ... (svn error 26754)"
>
> I'm making up the syntax, but you get the idea. People could search
> for "svn error 26754" and presumably get helpful hits, and this would
> remain stable even when we change the human-readable part of the error
> message.

I think that having both the numeric error code and the description
is a good idea.

In the port of Linux to the Nintendo DS, which I'm involved in,
we cannot put error strings into libc for space reasons.

So users are and always have been reporting some "error number X".

Redirecting them to the kernel header file that contains
the C #defines for the error messages (such as EPERM etc.)
is not that big of a burden. Especially since the file can be
accessed via http thanks to viewvc :)

-- 
Stefan Sperling <stsp_at_elego.de>                 Software Developer
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