How to Deal with Obscure Problems on UNIX

[Dan Bernstein]

In article <85864 at tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> perlman at giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Gary Perlman) writes:
> When my students do exercises in my software engineering class, some subset
> inevitably encounter error messages like:
> 	Make: Must be a separator on rules line 4.  Stop.
> 	Tcov lock file is busy - could not write data
> Even though I try to warn them of these messages, there are so many among the
> 20+ programs we use that even the best students fail to understand them all.

I make sure that all error messages in my programs are documented. This
doesn't help much for getting around really weird errors, but for them I
provide an address to write to for help. I can't convince Berkeley that
it'd be nice if foo -A always showed the author of foo, but hopefully
they'll see the light at some point.

> A partial solution to this problem might be to gather all these error
> messages, write possible explanations for them, and provide a tool to
> take a message and try to make sense of it.

It'd probably be easier to rewrite the program.

---Dan