My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 6, 2006 15:32 UTC (Thu) by thomasvs (guest, #36955)
In reply to: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com) by jwb
Parent article: My quest for a Linux audio player (Linux.com)

Well, how would your example application deal with any of the errors that could happen when trying to read from a file ?

Most applications special-case a few of the errno values, and then print a generic string with strerror()

Are these generic strings very good ? No, because they are generic - they don't have enough contextual information about what the application was doing when it triggered these problems.

In your example, using Python, you would get a confusing traceback because of a raised exception - for example, IOError if it couldn't find the file.

You have to accept that handling errors correctly is hard intrinsically. The application needs to combine information about the lower-level error *and* its execution context to interpret what has gone wrong and show a useful error for it.

Also, remember that your simplified example is not an application on the scale of totem or rhythmbox - there is yet more code involved to show a decent dialog with this information.

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