We need better emerge 'ERROR' messages for new users

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

I agree with that suggestion; I know that when I was first getting into Gentoo, I posted many times without the useful part of the error message for that exact reason. Portage does say something along the lines of "if you need help, post the top-most error...," but that doesn't mean much to a n00b. Maybe a moderator can split this post off and put it under "Other things Gentoo."
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OmSai · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 3:16 am Post subject:

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Split from topic "Issues during xorg-x11 install".

fuzzythebear · Guru Joined: 28 Nov 2004 Posts: 317

emerge nopaste .. then posting an error is as simple as
nopaste /file/name and bingo .. tells you the url

i found nothing easier to use.
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

OmSai · Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:07 pm Post subject:

Not that nopaste in cli isn't brilliant...
I wouldn't recommend it for forum use.

I don't like the idea of gentoo/portage related error text being posted outside of the forum.
Who's to say that google, etc would index those errors?
In this forum, I search certain keywords of the error text like specific file names, libaries, etc.
...and that's been working out very well for me.

So nopaste works for IRC, not forum threads.
The exception would be headless systems, and the rare case of X failing.
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

After looking into the nopaste method, I would have to agree with om. I would much rather keep the errors here in the community so that they are easily, overtly, and readily searched. The originally proposed idea was to place a line instructing the user to look above the first instance of "ERROR:" for reporting the problem. As I am not a portage developer, I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement this or any other solution. Are there any other methods that could be used to indicate the relevant portion of the error message to the user?
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OmSai · Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 10:24 pm Post subject:

The problem is that even though portage says "post the topmost build error", it does not obviously refer to the lowercase error, and so n00bs post "ERROR:..." instead.
I knocked off a random error message for illustration of what I think would be a good change -

Before

NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

I really thought about the idea of using different colours, but I wondered if that would even be possible. To change the colours like that, it would probably have to be done retroactively after an error is encountered. BUT, if that is possible, it would be a wonderful addition to Portage, in my opinion. I guess to further this discussion, we need to get some developers in here to help us understand what is possible and what is not.
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OmSai · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 2:32 am Post subject:

Submitted bug 204849 as an 'Enhancement/Feature Request'
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

Good idea submitting the bug report, but I don't think Andrew Gaffney liked your horse.

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OmSai · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 2:58 am Post subject:

It just wasn't a good time to be horsing around.
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

WOW, that was a terrible pun...I LOVE IT!

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padoor · Advocate Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 4185 Location: india

yes it looked like a bad timing -- though i do not like to think the horse was necessary

ofcourse the horse looks nice

we could make it a practice to post 10 lines above the ERROR
or all of it if it is a config failed error like

i would like the portage suggest the remedy and ask you to remerge with required parameters/useflags
as in some cases it says so.

even the color idea is attractive and make all the lines to be posted in the forum colored to make sense to reader and poster.

it will be useful to all not only to noobs

the search does not really provide already existing solved same error posts.
google some times find the forum posts of the same error topic better than the forum search.
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

I think the relevant portion of the error message being printed in a different colour is the best idea so far. I had been thinking about this idea for a while and didn't know how difficult it would be to implement, considering it would have to be retroactive--changing AFTER an error occurred. Then I thought about it a little longer, and it seems like the coloured text would only show up IF an error was encountered, so why can't it be that different colour by default? Again, as I am not a Portage developer, I don't understand all the ins and outs...

@padoor,

I don't understand why the horse is such a big deal. It just seemed like a way to make things a little more fun. I would think that reading error reports would be quite disheartening, so seeing a nice ASCII horse (or other creature) could be a relief. Is there some underlying reference that I don't get?

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padoor · Advocate Joined: 30 Dec 2005 Posts: 4185 Location: india

the same fun does not appear to be funny for everybody at everytime.
it is just Murphy's law[ if something can go wrong it will ]
the horse is superb and i liked it very much
still developer asked if it was necessary. we better leave it at that.

as om said it was not right time
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NathanZachary · Moderator Joined: 30 Jan 2007 Posts: 2608

Point taken.

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OmSai · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:54 am Post subject:

SLBMEH · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

The problem is the top most error is in the compiler output. The line that says it failed is the first line produced from portage. I'm kind of interested in this idea. I think I'm going to play around with portage to see if I can have it grab the log and find the first error and display that in the portage error message.
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OmSai · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 5:04 am Post subject:

OmSai · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 8:09 am Post subject:

Ok, I'm done setting up the page:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/FAQ_Troubleshooting_Emerge_Errors
Took a while since it was my first time using a wiki.

Feel free to add in your contributions

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Gentoo is the stick-shift of Linux.
You work it manually, it has somewhat better performance, but it's really for the fun of it.

Maedhros · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 11:25 am Post subject:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Gentoo Chat, since this isn't a support request.
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steveL · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 12:39 pm Post subject:

I agree the call-stack is pretty useless. If you have portage logging enabled update will display the last 30 lines of the log if only one package failed, or give you the tail lines for every package which failed on the run. I'll ask about modding the call stack info. zmedico in #gentoo-portage is always open to discussion (when he is about) and patches which don't impact on the central dep resolution are usually welcome if they help users.

We could easily colourise the log error lines as displayed above in update. (This is why I like writing it in bash; it's easy to change stuff and you don't need to ask for dev time to change a script on your system.) I'll look into it after we sort the timing guesstimate, and depclean which i really need on my desktop :P

OmSai · Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2008 2:24 pm Post subject:

Thanks, steveL
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Gentoo is the stick-shift of Linux.
You work it manually, it has somewhat better performance, but it's really for the fun of it.