Text version of Windows error messages in small_printf considered harmful

[Chris Faylor]

On Fri, Jun 04, 1999 at 10:46:10AM +0200, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>Chris Faylor wrote:
>> 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.
>
>IMHO, the environment variable method is ok. It allows, to debug an
>application, that is started from the service manager.
>The `strace' program would nevertheless be a convenient method. I
>like this idea, too, and I think, this program can be very easy:
>It only has to control the setting of the environment variable.

I was actually thinking of using OutputDebugString for strace_printf,
doing a simple 'if (strace ()) strace_printf (...)', letting the strace
program filter out the stuff that it needed.

The obviously crucial point here, though, is that the strace program should
not be a cygwin program.  Otherwise it's usefulness will be quite limited.

-chris