Strange singular/plural messages in 2.33.90

Nick Clifton nickc@redhat.com
Mon Jan 27 12:30:00 GMT 2020


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 ?

Cheers
  Nick



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