Mailing-List: contact cygwin-developers-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm Sender: cygwin-developers-owner AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com From: Chris Faylor Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 11:54:54 -0400 To: cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Subject: Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful Message-ID: <19990603115454.A1505@cygnus.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.3i 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 AT cygnus DOT com http://www.cygnus.com/