On Wed, 5 Apr 2006 19:27:07 +0200 (CEST) Michael Van Canneyt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Micha Nelissen wrote: > > > I don't agree: RTFM is *not* an excuse for insightful, to-the-point, > > clear, not too elaborate error messages. > > Yes, and the 'elaborateness' is controlled by the -v setting. > > The point is that "Can't find unit foo" can have several causes. Exactly! So: split them out, with a separate message for each of them. That's why we have separate messages anyway, right? To be helpful... > To find out the exact cause, you must use -vu. To find out even > more, you use -vut. after that, it's -va... > > RTFM is not an excuse, but people should also take some initiative > and start looking for the cause of trouble. The first thing is to > increase the verboseness of the compiler... For this, you should > read the manual. In one of the cases above, of the "several causes", you might need extra verbosity indeed, but there are at least two cases where a more helpful and to the point error message can be given. If you do not want to prioritize this item, it's fine, but please keep it open at wishlist level. > It's hard to determine the exact number/amount of messages that is > useful to detect/resolve problems. To get more 'feeling' for how > to resolve problems, one can and should read the manual... This very much sounds like the C mentality TBH: assume people know exactly what they are doing or burn them with cryptic error messages: one needs to debug it all in the aclocal/autoconf/automake/configure/... scripts and figure it out yourself. I'm not saying people shouldn't read manuals...just saying that "Can't find unit" can be split up in 3 or so "causes", and a more helpful message given for each of them. Micha _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
