Re: error.c: "Unknown system error" should report errno value

[Martin Koeppe]

On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Martin Koeppe <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > +      s = _("Unknown system error");
> > +      fprintf (stderr, ": %s (errno=%d)", s, errnum);
>
> I like the idea, but that "errno=" grates a bit, as user diagnostics
> shouldn't be so low-level.  How about this instead?
>
>  fprintf (stderr, _(": Unknown system error number %d"), errnum);

Ok, I could live with that. My idea was not to change the original 
string to avoid re-translation and to give a clear hint what this 
number is meant to be, i.e. that's an errno value. The number alone is 
probably of no use to any "normal" user anyway. (Though I first had 
only "(%d)" myself.) OTOH if strerror() cannot resolve the errno 
value, then there is probably a bigger problem in it, not a normally 
occuring case (generating a user level diagnostic has just failed!), 
and debugging should be made easy. I also think it's a good idea to 
have ":" and "%d" not within the string for easy and uniform 
translations. That's probably why %s is used that often I could 
imagine.

But with your idea in a debug case one could grep through all the 
source files and would also find that it is an errno value which has 
been reported. So I'm not against your idea.

Martin