Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] hw/arm/virt: error_report cleanups

[Markus Armbruster]

Peter Maydell <address@hidden> writes:

> On 9 November 2015 at 07:44, Markus Armbruster <address@hidden> wrote:
>> For consistency, error messages should be a phrase, not a full sentence,
>> let alone a paraphraph.
>
> This is in direct conflict with wanting them to be actually useful
> to users :-(

I appreciate your drive for useful error messages.  Judging from the
error messages we got, it's a rare thing.

Let me rephrase.  The error message proper (the thing emitted by
error_report()) should be a phrase, and it should be short and to the
point.  It can be followed by hints.  Compare:

    qemu-system-arm: Unable to determine GIC version supported by host. KVM 
acceleration is probably not supported.

and

    qemu-system-arm: Unable to determine GIC version supported by host
    KVM acceleration is probably not supported

I prefer the latter.  The error message proper is short and to the
point.  The hint points to the most probable cause.  Sensible line
lengths.

By the way, the error.h API supports this message + hints convention
since commit 50b7b00.