On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Frank Thieme wrote: > On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:21, David Jarvie wrote: > > On Mon, March 22, 2010 5:58 pm, Anne Wilson wrote: > >> But then most of us agree that they wouldn't understand a 'plain > English' > >> message either, so maybe it really is better to give something > google-able > >> for those that want to look for it. > > > > The point I'm trying to make (badly) is that on *some* occasions they > > would read a message and if it is in plain English, they would stand a > > chance of understanding it. But if it includes terms like Akonadi, > there's > > no way they'd understand it even if they Googled it (which they wouldn't > > anyway). > > What about a plain message for the user to inform and a hidden, more > technical message for the user that wants to investigate and solve > problems. There could be a small "click here for technical > information" link on the error dialog to unhide the technical stuff. > > I hope I can add something ... When I worked with software that heavily relayed on loging and the end user is the first one to read logs, I got few guidelines : log must say what you get , what you expected , in what area it is (subsystem) what/where to investigate. As an example : filename.cc:line ERROR In functionName, "Akonadi" service isn't started, use foobar to start it. filename.cc: line ERROR In functionName, Akonadi-super-cool-feature failed because (REASON), look in baz log for more info how to solve it. Every log must be saved in the normal place /var/log/|windows event log| product log directory. The most important that error log must be in one or two sentances involving the what is wrong , what is supposed to be , what to do. In cases where the error log is short enough with a simple solution that a person with small experience with the product could do the outcome will be (as I believe) good enough. -- -- -- Boris Shtrasman ------------ |Gnu/Linux Software developer | | IM : borissh@jabber.org | | URL : myrtfm.blogspot.com| _______________________________ _______________________________________________ KDE PIM mailing list kde-pim@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim KDE PIM home page at http://pim.kde.org/