On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Markus Wiederkehr <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 9:28 AM, Robert Burrell Donkin > <[email protected]> wrote: >> ATM exceptions contain messages in english. for some upstream use >> cases (in particular IMAP), it would be useful to be able to display >> to the user an internationalised reasonably diagnostic message. the >> actual i18n could be done upstream provided that this library supplied >> more information. > > I am not sure if it is a good idea to confront the user with exception > detail messages. I think details messages are often too technical for > being of any value to the average user (no insult intended ;-). > > I usually handle this by only letting the user know that something > went wrong. An administrator or technician can then look into the log > files and see what's going on.
i agree to some extent. there are lots of cases when that's the only solution. i can also understand why contacting an admin or technician is a unnecessary cost in some cases. for example, if a field cannot be parsed since it's badly formatted, this is just a data problem with the email. i think this could sometimes be reasonably presented to the user. > But that's just my two cents.. What would you need to implement what > you want? A unique tag for each exception? Easy for our own > exceptions, difficult for system library exceptions.. And what about > exception chaining? i'm not so concerned about system library exceptions or chained ones - these will usually indicate something that really needs the ops to take a look to find out what's gone wrong. something as simple as an enumeration or tag should be good enough to allow anyone who wants to internationalise. - robert
