Write good, descriptive titles for posts

After reading very attentively and several times all the previous posts in this thread, I've been ruminating upon them and the meaning of life and my conclusion is that you are all correct: people should ask ChatGPT for a good title to their threads.
 
cracauer@ said:
This is actually one of the things I don't like about UNIX. There is very limited ability to transport useful error messages from kernel to userland for a userland program to display. As a hack workaround, there is lots of basic error codes returned to userland and then a printf to dmesg. That's not quite cutting it in my opinion.

There's some API work for better error message transport but the details escape me right now.
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it might add complexity to security. If all system components are made as transparent as possible, error messages may also reveal interesting system details to a ssh guest user. A construct for clear admin feedback on all layers must be well checked for security holes.
 
Actually, the title of this thread is a bad example of a good title because it's, in fact, a bad title. A good title should be: "Write good, descriptive titles for your threads."
 
MG said:
it might add complexity to security. If all system components are made as transparent as possible, error messages may also reveal interesting system details to a ssh guest user. A construct for clear admin feedback on all layers must be well checked for security holes.
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I don't believe that debugability and security are opposite ends.

If your userlevel program used a system call that had a problem then a highly descriptive error message would at best help security through obscurity.
 
Maybe it would be because Unix started as a small (at the era) and resource-limited (compared to recent computers) OS.
But even if the errors are returned as "numbers" only from kernel or standard userland C library, support libraries to recognize the number and related info about the caller that triggered the error could be implemented and show user-readable and comfortable error messages.
 
Something I see too often nowadays is a title that's a statement but followed by a question mark. Like, "I want to install FreeBSD on my new laptop?" or "I just bought a house in this neighborhood?"
 
cracauer@ said:
This is actually one of the things I don't like about UNIX. There is very limited ability to transport useful error messages from kernel to userland for a userland program to display.
Click to expand...
plan9 fixed this (among other things) -- the OS returns an error string, not an error number. Unfortunately that experiment didn't quite succeed.
 
/dev/klog with priority ?.
On userland i use syslog-ng and put all logs in postgresl, with (CREATE INDEX idx_logs_created_at ON logs (created_at DESC));. That allows easy & fast filtering
 
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