On Fri, Oct 25, 2019 at 11:19 PM Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote: > > > [W]hich of the following is more readable to the user: > > > $ ls foo > > ls: foo: No such file or directory > > > or > > > $ ls foo > > ls: stat(foo): No such file or directory > > It depends entirely on the user. > > As I recently wrote on a non-NetBSD mailing list, there is no such > thing as a good or bad user interface; there is only a good or bad user > interfaces for a particular user (or class of sufficiently-similar > users). > > I've lost track of the number of times I've had to resort to a > sledgehammer such as ktrace to find out what's really going wrong > because an error message doesn't report enough information.
I've had similar experiences on KASSERT; if a KASSERT fails because of memory corruption, I wish to know not only if it fails or not but also values used in KASSERT. Anyway thank you for suggestions. I committed the patches with changing the error message for open while keeping one for setsockopt. It may be good to have guidelines on writing error messages somewhere. ozaki-r
