954012 - Improve Error Console for Protocol/Account Errors

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 953871

(Chat Core :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2010-11-08 16:32:00 UTC ***

This is an idea I've been knocking around my head for a bit (and I think we discussed it on IRC at one point), I know there's some implementation issues (we'd have to replace a bunch of libpurple code I believe).

Currently Account/Protocol log issues to the error console, I think this is incorrect and they should log to a different mechanism. Why? Because they usually deal w/ connection or firewall issues, etc. where the error console to me is more from code errors, etc. By creating a different log mechanism we could possible have filters for protocols and account levels for debugging purposes.

Another issue with this is that currently a lot of things pop up as errors that don't really seem like errors to me (i.e. everything still works without the user noticing an impact).

Perhaps something like the Thunderbird activity manager for keeping track of everything?

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2010-11-08 17:04:33 UTC ***

I agree with the need to have a way to filter the messages by account (but I don't think it could be possible with libpurple except if we decide to initialize one libpurple instance for each account connection).

I don't see why you believe the error console is not the place for these messages. When something breaks and requires an action from the user, there's an error message in the account manager. The error console is only useful for people who want to (help) debug an issue.

Connection/firewall issues should be clearly reported somewhere user visible with a message explaining how to fix the issue.

Comment 2

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2010-11-08 17:15:15 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #1)
> I don't see why you believe the error console is not the place for these
> messages. When something breaks and requires an action from the user, there's
> an error message in the account manager. The error console is only useful for
> people who want to (help) debug an issue.
I don't think the error console has the right UI for it, but it could probably be shoe-horned into it, but it could work. The filtering is the important part of this!

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2010-11-08 17:32:24 UTC ***

(In reply to comment #2)
> I don't think the error console has the right UI
You could stop the sentence there :). It's a mess. There's been a few attempts at improving it (you can search mozilla's bugzilla to find at least one) but it hasn't changed in a long while.

Comment 4

[Benedikt Pfeifer]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2010-12-30 10:52:06 UTC ***

To make sure this is known here:
Bug 953871 (bio 430) aks for filtering the error console with respect to a certain account or protocol.

Comment 5

[Patrick Cloke [:clokep]]

*** Original post on bio 575 at 2011-02-16 15:08:35 UTC ***

I'm going to mark this as a duplicate of bug 953871 (bio 430) since it didn't really have any firm idea and was just "this UI sucks, make it better."