Client error reporting

Richard Rauch — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 21:52:46 -0000

While beginning the work on exporting some of the
OpenGLEAN functionality to more specialized libraries,
something was brought to my attention: There is no way
for a client to report errors through OpenGLEAN.

For client applications, this is not a serious issue.
But for libraries that build on top of OpenGLEAN, the
lack of a centralized error reporting mechanism is
unfortunate. Either libraries need to add their own
error-reporting mechanisms or copy code from OpenGLEAN.

I think that in many cases, it is desirable to emit the
errors in a coherent, centralized manner. Especially,
as I noted, for libraries.

fprintf() would work fine if everyone ran applications
from a command-line. UNIX-ish syslog type calls would
be fine if everyone ran a UNIX-like OS.

I think that this is very much OpenGLEAN's alley as
portability library. Though arguably a bit afield from
windowing-and-graphics, I think that it is too trivial
to go in a library by itself, and OpenGLEAN already has
some support for this; we just need to export the
interface.

The idea should probably be allowed to stew for a while,
but it sound good to me.

Recent changes to 16: Client error reporting

Client error reporting