On 2010-04-16 at 11:25, Rich Bowen <[email protected]> wrote: > 1) How long is too long for an error message? For example is something > like this too much:
For a message that only gets logged at startup, I don't see any problem with length. I'd be a bit more conservative if a message could get logged on every request. > 2) Is there still opposition to putting URLs in error messages? What I > imagine is a series of tiny single-purpose web pages that do nothing > more than explain single error messages. So in this case, we'd have a > page that has the error message, and explains the three possible > causes of the error message, and how you'd fix each one. The error > message itself would contain a URL to that page, IN ADDITION TO the > message that's already there. That is, folks that for whatever reason > don't have net access at the moment are no worse off than they would > already have been had we not added this, so if the site goes down, > they're not completely at a loss as to what happened. > > This solution has the benefit of a fully detailed explanation, but > also has the problem that the URLs would tend to be fairly long, such > as http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/errors/no_vhosts.html I can see where those who repackage the server in commercial products might not like having Apache URLs in all the messages. And the URLS would be a bit long. If that won't fly, how about instead of URLs, adding message numbers? E.g. HTTP0023: NameVirtualHost %s:%u has no VirtualHosts... and add a section to the doc with the explanatory web pages for each message. > 3) I suppose a third alternative is to log an additional message, if > we're in LogLevel Debug, that has the detailed information. Hmm. That > might be worth pursuing all by itself, even if the other two > alternatives don't pan out. Can you give an example of that? Dan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
