On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 4:19 AM, Michael Thayer
<michael.tha...@oracle.com>wrote:
> On the one hand VBoxManage is meant as an advanced user tool (and the
> first line of the message contains "plain language" information about the
> error), on the other I'm not sure if the rest of the information really
> helps anyone. Perhaps a blank line before the "details" bit would help...
>
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the reply. About your response "you can run VBoxManage as root"
perhaps I'm thinking of Linux, where using programs as root is heavily
discouraged. Programs like VLC refuse to run as root, and many distros do
NOT allow you to log-in to the graphical desktop with your root credentials
by default.
http://smegnl.medina.oh.us/index.php/figured-it-out/71-enable-root-login-to-gui-in-fedora
http://www.howtogeek.com/124950/htg-explains-why-you-shouldnt-log-into-your-linux-system-as-root/
Of course you can 'su' from bash or 'sudo' to run programs as root, but
normally I execute virtualbox from my main account, which is NOT root.
Thinking aloud, perhaps running VBOXmanage as root should not fail, but
instead display a warning message telling users about the fact, so if they
were at a bash prompt and did 'su' before to run some other command but
then continue running vboxmanage as root as a mistake, they're quickly
aware of the fact?.
Option B: how about a middle-ground solution?. The messy details could be
saved to a file, and the error message could simply read "Details have been
saved to the file error[xx].log" Or appended to the system's error log if
invoked from another process (ie, non-interactively).
I think that the fact that a given program is a command line tool doesn't
exempt it from user-friendly messages. Digital Research's DR-DOS 6.0 had a
nice advantage over MS-DOS, it's human-friendly documentation of switches,
including examples of usage, invoked by appending /? to any given command.
I remember DR-DOS in high regard because of this.
Sorry for the long reply. Hope I've made my point clearer.
FC
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