On 9 November 2015 at 10:21, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> wrote: > Peter Maydell <peter.mayd...@linaro.org> writes: > >> On 9 November 2015 at 07:44, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> wrote: >>> For consistency, error messages should be a phrase, not a full sentence, >>> let alone a paraphraph. >> >> This is in direct conflict with wanting them to be actually useful >> to users :-( > > I appreciate your drive for useful error messages. Judging from the > error messages we got, it's a rare thing. > > Let me rephrase. The error message proper (the thing emitted by > error_report()) should be a phrase, and it should be short and to the > point. It can be followed by hints. Compare: > > qemu-system-arm: Unable to determine GIC version supported by host. KVM > acceleration is probably not supported. > > and > > qemu-system-arm: Unable to determine GIC version supported by host > KVM acceleration is probably not supported > > I prefer the latter. The error message proper is short and to the > point. The hint points to the most probable cause. Sensible line > lengths.
I agree that the latter is preferable; I had been under the impression that we weren't allowed to use newlines in error messages, though... > By the way, the error.h API supports this message + hints convention > since commit 50b7b00. Thanks, I had missed this useful improvement to the API. How does it work in cases like this where we don't have an Error* to fill in? thanks -- PMM
