Make error messages more useful: add a URI

[Benjamin Kaduk]

Maybe I should let Nico answer for himself, but

On Mon, 6 Oct 2014, Roland Mainz wrote:

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Nico Williams" <nico at cryptonector.com>
> > To: "Greg Hudson" <ghudson at mit.edu>
> > Cc: krbdev at mit.edu
> > Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2014 11:15:08 PM
> > Subject: Re: Make error messages more useful: add a URI
> >
> >
> > Roland suggests:
> >
> > [libdefaults]
> >
> >     err_fmt = %E. Please see https://whatever.example/%N
> >
> > where %E is whatever the error string would have been and %N is the
> > error code number (or symbolic name for it).
> >
> > The default would be %E.
> >
> > Additional contextual information could be provided with other tokens.
> >
> > This would allow sites to use URIs or some other non-URI string if they
> > prefer.
>
> BTW: Three nits:
> 1. Some error messages carry additional information, like an errno message. How can we integrate this ?

I'm pretty sure this is included in the "%E".

> 2. How can we carry over the value of LC_MESSAGES (or better: The result of LANG/LC_MESSAGES/LC_ALL, e.g. $ printf '%s\n' "${LC_ALL:-${LC_MESSAGES:-${LANG:-"C"}}}" # in a POSIX shell) ?

I suspect this is hard to do in a concise manner, so may not end up
getting done.

> 3. What about intranets with no connection to the outside "world" ?

The proposed file:/// URLs would still work.

-Ben