Re: Misleading error messages

Adriaan de Groot <adridg-FlD2LfDziEhmR6Xm/[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.tools.aap.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Lars Ivar Igesund wrote:
> I don't know if this happens with C, but when compiling
> D code and the compiler returns an error, aap reports
> that the buildaction failed in addition to the error message
> from the compiler.

Ooh, one of my favorite peeves as well. See, when AAP runs a command, it
goes:


Aap: <the big long compile command>
26 pages of error messages from the compile command
Aap: command failed for <the big long compile command>


It's often hard to spot _that_ there's an error exit (no, seriously: I
don't grep for "failed" in the output) because the AAP message at the end
looks so much like, say, a successful compilation step with no output.
See, the successful compilation would be

Aap: <the big long compile command>

with no output. Certainly if the command is 8 lines long, it's hard to
spot the "command failed".


It would be nice if the on-failure notices was something like "*** AAP:
Compile failed for $target" instead, possibly with the offending command
printed just above it. That makes it easier to recognize.

Printing the command line a second time can cause useful erro messages to
scroll off the screen, which might be a second reason _not_ to print the
offending command.

-- 
 Adriaan de Groot    adridg-FlD2LfDziEhmR6Xm/[email protected]     Kamer A6020     024-3652272
GPG Key Fingerprint 934E 31AA 80A7 723F 54F9  50ED 76AC EE01 FEA2 A3FE
               http://www.cs.kun.nl/~adridg/research/




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