[Grok-dev] Re: Zope 3 error message rage... :)

[Martijn Faassen]

Sebastian Ware wrote:
> ME GROK make nice error message!
> 
> About two weeks into Grok... I just want to state the obvious. Zope 3 
> error messages suck! If anything can be done about this. There is a lot 
> of time and effort to be saved. :)
> 
> It's beginning to feel a bit like the famous MS "An Unknown Error 
> Occurred While...".

Heh, I feel your pain. After a while you get used to them, but we need 
to think about how to make this better.

We have a number of classes of error:

GrokImportError - you do something wrong with grok stuff and it fails 
when the module gets imported. Not very common.

GrokError - you do something wrong with Grok stuff and grok fails during 
grok time (i.e. triggered from ZCML). Common enough

Zope 3 errors - all kinds of stuff. ComponentLookupErrors, etc. 
SystemError. Luckily security errors are pretty uncommon with Grok.

Which error messages are bothering you the most? Any errors in 
particular? I presume you know to look at the tracebacks in your zope 
process, right? Perhaps we can surgically improve some errors somehow. 
Philipp has been working on paste integration that might help with 
traceback display eventually.

One thing that is annoying is that a GrokError is somewhat obscured by 
the ZCML error that is the result. This means you need to look a few 
lines up to see the grok error. Is this a problem to you?

I'd like to improve the error story, but we need ideas on how we can 
improve things here. Anyone?

Regards,

Martijn