[Kde-pim] jargon is bad! :)

[Boris shtrasman]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:59 PM, Frank Thieme <frank at fthieme.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:21, David Jarvie <djarvie at kde.org> 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 at jabber.org   |
| URL      : myrtfm.blogspot.com|
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