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Date: Fri, 04 Jun 1999 10:46:10 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna AT vinschen DOT de>
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To: Chris Faylor <cgf AT cygnus DOT com>
CC: cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Subject: Re: Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered 
 harmful
References: <19990603115454 DOT A1505 AT cygnus DOT com>
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Chris Faylor wrote:
> 
> 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.

I agree. I'm native german and it's easier for me to work with error
codes than with german or english error messages. It's definitely
easier to find related information with the error code instead of with
the error message.

> 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.

IMHO, the environment variable method is ok. It allows, to debug an
application, that is started from the service manager.
The `strace' program would nevertheless be a convenient method. I
like this idea, too, and I think, this program can be very easy:
It only has to control the setting of the environment variable.

Regards,
Corinna