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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: How to Deal with Obscure Problems on UNIX
Message-ID: <7220:Nov1408:26:4390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 90 08:26:43 GMT
References: <85864@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Organization: IR
Lines: 21

In article <85864@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> perlman@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Gary Perlman) writes:
> When my students do exercises in my software engineering class, some subset
> inevitably encounter error messages like:
> 	Make: Must be a separator on rules line 4.  Stop.
> 	Tcov lock file is busy - could not write data
> Even though I try to warn them of these messages, there are so many among the
> 20+ programs we use that even the best students fail to understand them all.

I make sure that all error messages in my programs are documented. This
doesn't help much for getting around really weird errors, but for them I
provide an address to write to for help. I can't convince Berkeley that
it'd be nice if foo -A always showed the author of foo, but hopefully
they'll see the light at some point.

> A partial solution to this problem might be to gather all these error
> messages, write possible explanations for them, and provide a tool to
> take a message and try to make sense of it.

It'd probably be easier to rewrite the program.

---Dan