On 11/27/2011 8:34 AM, Rich Bowen wrote: > At Apachecon several of us were discussing how error messages could be made > more helpful without making them paragraphs. Two suggestions were made - > adding a URL to the message or adding a number/code to each error that would > then be looked up for more information. > > Any thoughts on 1) the wisdom of this and 2) the method of assigning codes? > > I've long considered error messages to be documentation and would live to see > the log files be one step more helpful. > > -- > Rich Bowen > rbo...@rcbowen.com
This sounds like a cool idea. I think making the error code something distinct that a crawler on the web would find is important - making it that much easier for someone who plugs in the error message they get into their favorite search engine. A good example, though probably not intentional, are some of the error messages thrown in openssl. Because those strings just don't show up by accident on the web, it makes finding those error numbers a bit less of a chore... and with having real documentation behind them, might actually be helpful unlike some of those many "I get this error, please help" messages on the web. Also, we should consider format. Wiki or doc? There are so many messages that could be thrown that crowdsourcing the documentation for it may allow us to cover more bases. -- Daniel Ruggeri
