<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Jul 4, 2007, at 11:29, Carl Worth wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><snip></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">The point is, right now you might have a program that fails and prints</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">a totally bogus error message:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>cairo is unhappy: out of memory</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">And that leads to misleading bug reports. Which of the following</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">replacements would lead to better bug reports?</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>cairo is unhappy: unknown error</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </SPAN>cairo is unhappy: GDI error</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I know which one I would prefer to see.</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>GDIError would help a lot. For the situation I was having where users are telling me they're getting out-of-memory error notifiers, I'm running their code on OSX/X11 and wondering, what is going on here?</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The windows error system is interesting in that it is common to set an error code, and then place further qualifying information in extra parameters. Strings for example. This is the same pattern that has been used for the win32 backend. You get one error code, the real info is on stderr. This is different from the traditional *nix approach where each error code is a pretty succinct error and and can be mapped statically to some sort of explanation string. I don't care about the mechanism, it would be nice from a language binding's pov to be able to report a string to the user that is more than just "GDI error" since that could be so many things.</DIV><BR><DIV> <SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: auto; -khtml-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -apple-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><DIV>--</DIV><DIV>Travis Griggs</DIV><DIV>Objologist</DIV><DIV>"I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward." - Henry David Thoreau</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></SPAN> </DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>