[19024] in Kerberos_V5_Development
Re: Make error messages more useful: add a URI
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Hornstein)
Thu Oct 2 22:57:48 2014
Message-Id: <201410030257.s932vXlt017022@hedwig.cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
From: Ken Hornstein <kenh@cmf.nrl.navy.mil>
To: krbdev@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <542DA0B3.2050303@mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 22:57:33 -0400
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>In general I am an error message minimalist; I think error messages
>should be useful, but also readable. I do not generally see URIs or
>unique identifiers in the error messages reported by my applications and
>tools; in the rare cases where I do, it tends to make me feel like the
>application is clunky.
I can offer my experience being on the developer side and having to deal
with end-users as part of a big rollout.
>From an end-user perspective, the error messages are almost always
meaningless; they all boil down to "system failure" (I'm talking about
the average end-user). In our environment users don't google the text
error message; they contact the support desk. So they either have to
read the error message over the phone or (more sophisticated) they
can cut and paste or do a screenshot and send it via email. I think the
majority of support happens on the phone.
Now if URIs did pop up, would users click or cut & paste them? Maybe.
I don't have a good sense for that. I think we'd be willing to write
custom web pages that would deal with a lot of first-level tech support
questions, which might be nice. We'd need an easy way to provide a custom
set of URIs to Kerberos implementations, though; I don't really want to
have to patch com_err tables. Nico's later suggestion about a line in
libdefaults looks interesting.
--Ken
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