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Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful
- To: cygwin-developers@sourceware.cygnus.com
- Subject: Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful
- From: Chris Faylor <cgf@cygnus.com>
- Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 11:54:54 -0400
Now that I've had the chance to use the extended error messages that
Mumit recently added to smallprint.c, I have to say that I'm not thrilled.
The error messages extend the length of the line so that things wrap
in a way that makes it hard to read. Worse, I've received a couple of
strace logs from non-US users and the error messages are incomprehensible
to me. Another problem is that it is not easy to figure out exactly
which error *code* is being displayed even when the error is in English.
Because of this, I have conditionalized this code in recent snapshots.
It's off by default. I'm thinking that an alternative is to add the
possibility to create text messages as an STRACE option. I have always
wanted to write an strace program rather than using the kludgey environment
variable method. If we did this, we could do something like
'strace --text file.exe' to produce error message logs with text error
messages.
--
cgf@cygnus.com
http://www.cygnus.com/