Re: Strange singular/plural messages in 2.33.90

[Alan Modra <amodra at gmail dot com>]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2020 at 12:30:19PM +0000, Nick Clifton wrote:
> Hi Alan,
> 
> > Is there a need to report "debuginfod: "?  I'm thinking we could
> > consolidate these messages a little to cut down on translation work.
> > OK?  (-w diff shown to exclude all the leading space to tab changes)
> 
> No, but ...  there is a possibility for user confusion here.
> The warning comes from the debuginfod code attempting to compute
> a build id, but the message does not indicate this.  Thus a user
> seeing the message is not going to understand why readelf is
> complaining about a corrupt note, especially if they have not
> asked for notes to be displayed.  Plus these days most binaries
> have multiple note sections, so it is not at all clear which note
> is actually corrupt.
> 
> I think that we would better off saying something like:
> 
>   Malformed note at offset %x in section %s encountered 
>   whilst computing build-id.
> 
> This also handily removes the need for a plural form of the message.
> What do you think ?

OK, I'll drop my patch then.  It was one I'd made before you committed
your fix for the singular/plural inconsistency, and my only interest
remaining in the patch was to reduce translation work..

I'm of the opinion that most of these messages could be replaced with
"fuzzing detected, giving up", or some ruder variant!

-- 
Alan Modra
Australia Development Lab, IBM