Hi Andreas,

On Thu, Dec 28, 2006 at 04:43:14PM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:

> Other companies uses messages of the form MMMM-NNNN (component-msgnum)
> so that messages can be allocated separately between different pieces
> of software or components (e.g. MGS, LMV, or other parts of the code
> that are being worked on independently).

That could be useful, but it makes the message longer.  Sun managed to
come up with a unified set of message numbers (with 6 digits) for all of
Solaris so we should be able to do this as well.

> One issue with this is if a message is unclear or otherwise lacking
> information and it needs to be fixed then it presumably needs to have
> a new message ID.  That in turn means that the message database will
> have duplicate information, or there needs to be a facility to link
> different messages together like "XXXX: (previously YYYY, ZZZZ)"...

I don't understand why this duplication is a problem or why we would
need to "link" back to previous messages.

> There are already 2224 CWARN and CERROR messages in the current code
> base, so I'm not sure a use-once 4-digit number is large enough.

We can extend to 5 or more digits later if needed.  That's explicitly
part of the proposal and required of any parsing tool.

> Another alternative is to allow the format to "grow" by adding on
> elements to the end and allowing the "non-format" parts of the
> message to change (improved wording, etc) so long as there are no
> changes in the order of existing format elements.

Yes.  See my comments to Nathan about parsing messages, but maybe I'm
being too rigid here and wording changes are OK.

I do not want to allow "growing" the format under any circumstances
though.  The reason is that we need to distribute the web-based parser
so that it can be used by secure sites, and I want the parser to be able
to say "no, I don't know how to deal with this message; you need to
upgrade me" rather than provide an incomplete (or incorrect)
interpretation.  Allocating a new message ID (which would be recognized
by an outdated parser as "too new") is the most reliable way to do this.

> As for "committed to any branch of CVS", that imposes a burden
> on in-development code which might have numerous changes before
> the code is first released...

True.  My goal here was partially paranoia and partially to make sure we
can always interpret messages in Buffalo, which sometimes tests
non-production branches.  Perhaps this requirement could be relaxed to
"committed to any production branch" - but then we need to define
"production branch."  Can we guarantee that customers (including
partners) will never pull or be given code from branches other than
b1_4, b1_5, and the release branches?

Cheers,
Jody

> 
> Cheers, Andreas
> --
> Andreas Dilger
> Principal Software Engineer
> Cluster File Systems, Inc.

-- 

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