Poor quality error messages

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Emacs.

During a bootstrap (not of the standard code), the make failed,
presenting me with the following half error message:

  In toplevel form:
  cedet/ede.el: Error: No applicable method: initialize-instance, nil, nil
  make[2]: *** [Makefile:308: cedet/ede.elc] Error 1
  make[2]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

..  Is this really the best we can do?

The following faults with this half message are readily apparent:

(i) There is no line/column numbers of the failure point in the file.  "In
  toplevel form" isn't very helpful.
(ii) There is no preposition or verb indicating the relationship between
  the missing method (whatever that is) and initialize-instance.
(iii) Is initialize-instance the method that is missing?
(iv) To what is the method (whatever that is) meant to be applicable?  To
  initialise-instance, perhaps?  Or to "nil, nil"?  Or to something else?
(v) It is not clear what the "nil, nil" at the end of the half message is
  meant to mean.

Just for info, grep finds no matches for "initialize-instance" in ede.el.

If anybody can help me on any of these points with this half error
message, please do.

I'm intending to fix (or at least ameliorate) point (i) in my current
work on the correct positions for warning messages.

At least I know what's causing the problem, in that if I remove certain
bits of code the error doesn't happen.  That's not helping me diagnose
the mechanism of this failure, though.

Thanks for any help!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).