1843629 - Add section about common non-fatal errors in quick reference document

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Developer Infrastructure :: Firefox Source Docs: Content, task, P3)

Description

[Tim Giles [:tgiles]]

New contributors tend to stop when they see any kind of error, whether it is relevant, non-fatal, etc. We should add some guidance on how to read errors and how to determine if an error is actually blocking or not. For example we've seen the following cases:

• Java extension in vscode becoming confused due to paths inside of mozilla-central and throwing errors in the "Problems" section of the integrated terminal.
• Glean errors about setting metrics (which are non-fatal as far as I can tell)
• Exception in Region.sys.mjs because it failed to fetch a region, but otherwise did not cause a crash or anything
• On Windows, warning: Watchman unavailable: "watchman" executable not in PATH ([WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified)

Maybe this is too ambiguous to write an extensive section about, but I think there's value in having a section that says "hey, sometimes you encounter errors that don't crash your build or browser, it happens and you can continue your work".

Comment 1

[Tim Giles [:tgiles]]

Attachment: Bug 1843629 - Explain some non-fatal errors in the OS build docs. r=sylvestre

These are some of the errors that some Outreachy applicants were
experiencing. Figured having some additional documentation explaining
that not all errors and warnings are fatal might help unblock new
contributors in the future.

Comment 2

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/d51b9619ea14
Explain some non-fatal errors in the OS build docs. r=sylvestre DONTBUILD

Comment 3

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/d51b9619ea14