RE: Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful

["Parker, Ron" <rdparker@butlermfg.org>]

I am hoping to kill this thread.

I don't like the extended error messages for the same reasons others have
given.  

Also forcing the output to English as recommended by Mumit won't work.  On
localized versions of Windows, English text is not guaranteed to be present.

However, I also agree that I hate looking up error codes. So, I've attached
the source for a small program that looks many of them up for you.

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Faylor [mailto:cgf@cygnus.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 1999 10:55 AM
To: cygwin-developers@sourceware.cygnus.com
Subject: Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf
considered harmful


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/

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