Re: Unhelpful error message

["Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg tristatelogic com>]

In message <CAA5A4C6-C2CD-46CC-9353-0216D567EC30 ceridwen fremont ca us>, you w
rote:

> On Oct 5, 2013, at 4:26 PM, Steve White <stevan white gmail com> wrote:
>
> > Hi John,
> >
> > I'm afraid your suggestion is awful.  It's prolix and scarcely more
> > helpful than the existing one.  The (rough) suggestion I provided
> > would be much better.
> One more time: The suggestion you provided isn't feasible. Gtk doesn't know
> what the problem locale is. It can find out, but that's really not its job,

Where I come from, it is incumbant upon, and is the responsibility of
every piece of code that issues a warning or error mesage to identify
the nature and cause of the problem in a way that will be maximally
helpful to users.

Obviously, the thing... whatever it is.. that GTK is complaining about
being "unsupported" has a name.  GTK could print that name as part of
the warning message.  This seems neither hard nor otherwise unreasonable.

> It's the application's job before starting Gtk.

Well, the applications (both Firefox and Opera, and god only knows what
all else) aren't doing it.  (Google for the original message I reported
and you will come up with several gazillion hits, mostly postings by
other users who are just as perplexed by the messages as I am, and who
likewise aren't being given enough helpful cluse to even begin to investi-
gate this problem.)

> It's possible for the application to mess things up. Not likely, but possible.
> That's not
> Gtk's problem. It's not even Gtk's problem that it has an unfriendly error mes
> sage, 
> because the application (which should be localizing way more than Gtk is) shou
> ld be
> checking the localization and providing whatever feedback its developers think
> is 
> appropriate before starting Gtk, so that users never see Gtk's warning.

If indeed the GTK warning message in question should never been seen, then
great!  Please remove it.   At least that will prevent millions of people
from worrying needlessly about what they have done wrong.  It may also
have the additional salutary side-effect of avoiding needless/pointless
log file pollution.