Idea

[McMahon]

Hello I have a new idea

I think that all error messages should have a Serial number to reference on a database. these numbers would match the exact specification of the machine the version of appropiate software etc the database would become quite large quite quickly, so how about a distributed computing project that way downloads would be gradual and the database could be mirrored and speeded up for the whole 'net to access.

So is this a good un'?

[garyng]

Hello I have a new idea

I think that all error messages should have a Serial number to reference on a database. these numbers would match the exact specification of the machine the version of appropiate software etc the database would become quite large quite quickly, so how about a distributed computing project that way downloads would be gradual and the database could be mirrored and speeded up for the whole 'net to access.

So is this a good un'?

Yes, except that no one does it other than some old fashion system from IBM etc. I remembered seeing IBM SE solving problems this way in their mainframe/minis, just looked up the error code and there are very detail descriptions of what happened and how to solve it. It takes lots of resources to do this kind of thing(imaging asking all apps developers to have a proper error code for each error their program will encounter).

[McMahon]

The First part of the number would be system specific. The second part would be program specific. If a programer has to type in "the system cannot find /hda1/whatever etc etc then surely a simple number on the end of the text is not too much to ask???

The google engine is very fast so maybe the database could use that tech or similar.

[garyng]

I used to write programs this way because it needed to support multi-langual and without a proper error message system, it is very difficult to do over the phone technical support and I can tell you that this is "A LOT" to ask. It requires the developer to notice this intend long before the system starts coding phase.

Given the number of apps KNOPPIX use(and other distro as well), it would be another 10 years before we see it happens even we start from now for this task.

It is not about how to maintain the database or the search, it is how to put them into the programs in the first place.

It would be more doable to just dump whatever error message into a database and use google to search the keywords