[Grok-dev] Documenting error codes

[Steven H. Rogers]

On Wed, June 20, 2007 08:02, Sebastian Ware wrote:
> This might be a strange idea, but I find that a lot of the problems I
> encounter are solved by searching on parts of the error message.
> However, error messages tend to have custom variable names etc. so
> they aren't perfect search queries.
Not a strange idea at all.

>
> Would it be practical to create a searchable index of error messages
> where the error messages are represented as RegExp queries?
>
> Instead of searching the index with "my" error message, the index
> searches my error message using the list of RegExp to see if one of
> them matches. That way maybe one could eventually perform the search
> directly in the error trace. Thus giving context sensitive help right
> when and where it is needed the most...
>
I'm looking at doing something like this for IPython, but it would
generally be usable in any Python environment.  The motivation is to
provide bettter interactive help, but extracting items to search for from
error traces would certainly be very helpful.

# Steve