[232] in Kerberos
reporting of errors
daemon@TELECOM.MIT.EDU (steiner@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Oct 27 15:21:53 1987
From: steiner@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
To: kerberos@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
One of the most frequent complaints I've heard about Kerberos
is that the way it deals with errors is ad hoc at best. I'd
like to solicit ideas for a consistent and handy way of dealing
with them.
As it now stands, sometimes returned errors are ignored by the
calling routines; some routines take it upon themselves to print
a message (sometimes to stderr, sometimes to stdout) and exit (or
not); sometimes perror() is used; the com_err library is used some places
and not others; if an error code manages to find its way back to the user,
it's usually the same error for any number of wildly different problems.
Sometimes when getting an error, the program will print its name,
sometimes the routine will print its name. In the list of error
texts (krb_err_text.c in the library), the routine name is a part
of the error string. Is this helpful?
Should there be a krb_errno a la Unix errno? Or is there a better
way to handle the problem than a global variable?
Any comments are appreciated.
Jennifer
