Basic error handling
Basic error handling
Posted Apr 13, 2006 11:44 UTC (Thu) by endecotp (guest, #36428)Parent article: Thunderbird looks forward
What I'd like to see is some basic attention to the good programming practice of reporting errors, rather than throwing them away; Debain users may have encountered the mysterious "An error occurred while creating a message compose window. Please try again.". What this really means is "open("/usr/lib/thunderbird/components/myspell") = -1 ENOENT (No such file
or directory)"; if it reported that we'd all know to "apt-get install myspell", but without it, we're lost. "Trying again", needless to say, does not help.
There are other examples in the IMAP handling where meaningful error responses from the IMAP server are discarded and a generic error message is presented.
It may well be that these generic messages are more friendly to some users, but I, like most LWN readers I suspect, are looking for something else.