Reimar Döffinger wrote:

Hi, On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 04:45:53AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

...

"Also" - in addition to what? Unless someone can get this to make sense, I'd prefer to drop that word entirely.

That was just a last-minute addition. Adding scale at the end will actually help only in some very rare cases (actually the only case I know of if postprocessing + -vo gl/gl2).

I just wanted to hint that this is not neccessarily the reason for that error message...

In theory that hinting would be accomplished by the use of the word "try", i.e. indicating that this is not a guaranteed fix - but you know what they say about theory vs. practice. I don't really like the current form, and for that matter I don't think it actually accomplishes what you're trying to do, but I'm not sure how to make the hint as explicit as it would need to be without being a lot clunkier (and perhaps more verbose) than is really appropriate. -- The Wanderer Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any side of it. A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.

Reimar Döffinger wrote:

Hi, On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 10:42:27PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

...

In theory that hinting would be accomplished by the use of the word "try", i.e. indicating that this is not a guaranteed fix - but you know what they say about theory vs. practice. I don't really like the current form, and for that matter I don't think it actually accomplishes what you're trying to do, but I'm not sure how to make the hint as explicit as it would need to be without being a lot clunkier (and perhaps more verbose) than is really appropriate.

Just remove the "Also" if you want, it is fine with me (and might be less confusing). I don't have any really good idea either.

Although being more verbose in this case shouldn't be a problem since it will be a fatal error.

This holds true up to a limit (I don't think anyone wants to see, say, a 60-line spew from a single source even in such a case as this), but if we follow your suggestion below I think the message could easily overflow that ill-defined limit.

If we decide to go that way we should collect the possible reasons for this message. One other I can thing of is missing codecs if I remember correctly.

That doesn't sound like a bad solution to me, although if we do it I think - for reasons mentioned above - that a better approach would be to collect and explain the list of reasons somewhere in the *ML documentation and replace the "Also try" line with something to the effect of "See <path to file in docs> for possible reasons and/or solutions.". If we go forward with this (which would require that people who, unlike me, actually know the code identify the various possible reasons for the error), I'll be willing to collect and collate the explanations into a reasonably coherent patch. If such contributions do not arise, I'll just remove the "Also", as an inadequate alternative. Think I should post a "possible reasons for this message?" to -dev-eng, or are the people there who are likely to speak up also subscribed to -docs? -- The Wanderer Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any side of it. A government exists to serve its citizens, not to control them.

On Sat, Jul 30, 2005 at 04:46:26PM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

Think I should post a "possible reasons for this message?" to -dev-eng, or are the people there who are likely to speak up also subscribed to -docs?

If in doubt, send this to dev-eng. Diego