Is BackupPC packaged for Fedora now?
While this particular error message is, I agree, pretty useless, I'll make a general comment.
Software is, necessarily, notorious for generally only being able to "present the evidence immediately before it". Most applications, for example,
cannot know that the reason for their connection failure is that the network tech at their ISP got drunk, and spilled booze all over the server.
When an application goes to write a block to a file, and that fails, the application cannot know that the reason for that is that your now-ex
girlfriend took your disk apart, and appied a safety-pin to the surface while it was spinning, nor can said application offer up advice on
picking better life-mates.
In environments where there's exotic "exception handling", one generally finds that the exception tree is only *slightly* more helpful in giving you clues about
what really might be going on.
It's easy for naive users (and I'm not accusing anyone specifically of being in that state, just to be clear) to become frustrated at error messages. But software is notoriously
poor at "troubleshooting", and making the kinds of intuitive leaps that *humans* make, in order to provide better, more-enlightening, error messages.
on Jun 20, 2014, Timothy Murphy <gayleard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Many applications give unhelpful error messages,
but I've never met any quite as useless
as the invariable message from BackupPC:
"Unable to read 4 bytes"
If only it could sometimes say
"Unable to read 3 bytes"
or even "Hooray, was able to read 1 byte".
What 4 bytes did it want to read, incidentally?
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
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