On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, Micha Nelissen wrote:
> 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. That may be harder than you think, because the routines looking for a unit source do not know WHY they are looking for this. So they just report 'sorry, we didn't find what you requested". (you=other compiler routines) At the moment when the compiler decides it needs to recompile a unit and starts looking for sources, it doesn't know yet whether it will find it or not, so it has no sense outputting a message then. You would get far too many messages. Yes, you could pass on a 'reason' why a unit is searched, and then output that, but it would make the compiler slower and more complicated. So, for this, you need to use -vu. Then you can follow the compiler's logic exactly... Which doesn't mean we shouldn't maybe rephrase some messages, but just don't get your hopes up too high :-) Michael. _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
