xkbcomp-1.4.0 gives useless error messages
Submitted by Bodo Thiesen
Assigned to Xorg Project Team
Link to original bug (#101846)
Description
The file
xkb_keymap {
xkb_keycodes "de" {
<SYSRQ>
= 107; // <PRSC>
Gives error message
syntax error: line 3 of stdin last scanned symbol is: SYSRQ Errors encountered in stdin; not compiled.
Which doesn't actually tell what's wrong. After asking on unix.stackexchange.com I figured out, the key names must not be longer than 4 characters. So, the error message should have been something like »key name SYSRQ is longer than 4 characters«. After solving this issues, now I get
Error: Couldn't lookup keysym Symbol interpretation ignored
multiple times (and other messages, but there a few more details are given, maybe enough for me to figure out what's wrong).
So: Error messages should be descriptive, so we can actually see, what's wrong, and they should help new people to find solutions to their understanding problems.