Error messages need help

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-17 08:39:20

One of the things that makes Boost.Build hard to use is that error messages 
aren't very helpful, or are even downright misleading. (I'm guessing that 
this is a problem inherited from jam, rather than anything the Boost.Build 
team has done.)

I'm also guessing that most of the trouble is caused by a very few 
messages, so it might not be all that hard to fix. Thus this posting.

Trying to run the Win32 regression tests on the main trunk for the first 
time since the 1.29.0 release produced a couple of examples (probably 
because developers forgot to update status/Jamfile):

"don't know how to make 
<status>libs/function/test\deprecated_syntax_test.cpp"

If the message for this one was "file not found" with the actual absolute 
file path, it would be easier to interpret.

"don't know how to make <borland><*><cxxflags>-w-8026 -w-8027 -w-8057 
-w-8084 -w-8092"

That one is so obscure to me as a non-expert user that I have no idea what 
is wrong, so can't suggest better wording. The same attempt to suppress 
borland warnings appears a number of times in the Jamfile, why one is 
somehow deficient is a mystery.

I'd really be surprised if better diagnostic messages didn't reduce support 
requests and reduce user frustration.

--Beman