Re: Error message nitpick

Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:

> Those errors are as old as svn itself. The problem is that we now have
> four definitions of 'lock':

I remember :-)

> * working-copy 'locks', used to get exclusive access to a working copy
> dir (used by libsvn_wc),
>
> * repository BDB 'locks', a resource that BDB can run out of,
>
> * repository FSFS 'write lock', used by libsvn_fs_fs to get exclusive
> access when doing a write operation,
>
> * repository locks -- the new svn 1.2 feature for reserving access to
> imaginary files.
>
>
> I'm not sure what we can do to disambiguate these error messages or
> terminologies.

I just did a quick grep for "lock" on the subversion.pot file which
results in 95 matches. Most of them have to do with the locking
functionality.

I have no idea how to resolve this completely, here are some randomly
picked messages and a partial solution:

"Error opening db lockfile"
=> db = server != working copy => Locking UI not involved => OK

"Can't get exclusive lock on file '%s'"
=> I wasn't locking this file was I? => Confused

"Can't unlock charset translation mutex"
=> sounds so far away, can't have anything to do with locking :-)

"Cannot write lock/entries hashfile '%s'"
=> Did I get my lock now or didn't I?

"Working copy not locked; this is probably a bug, please report"
=> It's probably a bug, but is my file locked now or not?

"Attempt to unlock with non-empty unwind stack"
=> Huh?

For a partial solution I'd suggest to prefix error messages with the
module that's throwing them.

Examples, used the filename as a hint for the prefix:
"BDB: Error opening db lockfile"
"FileIO: Can't get exclusive lock on file"
"UTF: Can't unlock charset translation mutex"
"FSFS: Cannot write lock/entries hashfile '%s'"
"SVN Error: Working copy not locked; this is probably a bug, please report"
"SVN Error: Attempt to unlock with non-empty unwind stack"

this would get rid of at least some of the ambiguities.

Eventually the last two examples could be resolved by using the
"intended function" as prefix:
"SVN WC: Working copy not locked; this is probably a bug, please report"
"Locking: Attempt to unlock with non-empty unwind stack"

Cheers
-Lübbe

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Received on Tue May 3 12:10:07 2005