------- Comment #3 from manu at gcc dot gnu dot org 2007-05-18 14:16 ------- I see several reasons for not doing this:
1) External tools expect the current output format. Your proposal will break that. 2) Standards are not freely distributable, thus they are not widely available. 3) Getting the extra text (testcases, examples, etc) right seems even more complex than getting the original message right. 4) Given the effort-benefit ratio, I don't see many GCC developers jumping into this. Nevertheless, as Andrew points out, we would rather correct cryptic diagnostics. Whenever you find one, you could open a bug report for it. We already have similar bug reports (see PR 29062). Finally, if you still think it is worth it, you could implement it yourself as a wrapper to the output of GCC (similar to how colorgcc [*] works). Parse the output of GCC, match diagnostic messages, and depending on the matched message, write whatever text you think would be appropriate. Much easier than hacking GCC itself and it will give an idea on how difficult the task actually is and how many people would be actually interested on it. [*] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/devel/colorgcc.html -- manu at gcc dot gnu dot org changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |manu at gcc dot gnu dot org http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31983
