[Gnue-dev] Policy for error messages

[Jan Ischebeck]

Hello all,

After GNUe reports client made so much progress over last weeks, I
decided to try it out. But I allways got the same error message:

The gnue.conf file appears to be missing
The file should be located in one of the following locations
bla bla ...

I moved gnue.conf a little bit around, but although forms and designer
found the file, reports still had problems. Looking at the code I
realized that the real reason was an >NoSectionError:section reports
not found<. After spending some much time moving gnue.conf around, I 
thought of making life easier for other people, who forget to update 
their gnue.conf, and to replace that misleading error message by an
appropriate one.

But the problem goes farer than just replacing one message. In case of
GConfig every kind of error was catched and the same error message (file
not found ) was printed allways.  i.e. the first step is to catch just
IOErrors in GConfig. the second step is to catch the  >NoSectionError< 
and write a error message, but what should happen to all other
exceptions which can occure? These kind of exceptions will allways be
there, because its difficult to care for all possible errors while
writing the code.  I thought of two ways to handle them:

a) catch the Exception and write ... Error type ,,, msg 
b) don't catch the Exception

What do you think? What is the better solution, or do you know a BEST
solution?

Jan

Jan Ischebeck
University of Bonn
Sinologie
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