Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful

[Chris Faylor]

Now that I've had the chance to use the extended error messages that
Mumit recently added to smallprint.c, I have to say that I'm not thrilled.
The error messages extend the length of the line so that things wrap
in a way that makes it hard to read.  Worse, I've received a couple of
strace logs from non-US users and the error messages are incomprehensible
to me.  Another problem is that it is not easy to figure out exactly
which error *code* is being displayed even when the error is in English.

Because of this, I have conditionalized this code in recent snapshots.
It's off by default.  I'm thinking that an alternative is to add the
possibility to create text messages as an STRACE option.  I have always
wanted to write an strace program rather than using the kludgey environment
variable method.  If we did this, we could do something like
'strace --text file.exe' to produce error message logs with text error
messages.

-- 
cgf@cygnus.com
http://www.cygnus.com/