story of a failure

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2013 at 3:21 AM, David Cheney
<david.cheney at canonical.com> wrote:
> The error messages are for us, the developers, to diagnose our customers
> problems. If the customers find the error messages tiresome, it is our
> job to fix the errors, not make them more aesthetically pleasing.

It's a noble goal, but it's still missing the real point. Your log
messages will never get closer to a good log, no matter how much you
love your error tailoring craft.

What was being done before the failure? What were the actual arguments
for the query performed? What was the timing between the events?

An EOF from the database is just that, though. Your request failed
because the connection was shut on the driver. Saying

    "mongo query failed: cannot acquire socket: cannot log in: error
    authorizing user "admin": request failed: cannot read reply: EOF"

Is just as good as saying:

    "mongo query failed: EOF"

And I happen to have a good background on debugging database driver problems.

> Roger has my complete support to make our error messages as verbose as
> he likes.

You all have my complete support on doing whatever you like to do as
well. Every once in a while I'll try to make you like something else,
though.


gustavo @ http://niemeyer.net