Comment 3 for bug 549877

On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 12:05:19PM -0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Unfortunately I think that new text would be worse than the old. User-
> facing words shouldn't be all-caps. "Unhandable" is not an English word
> (and if you meant "unhandlable", that's an extremely uncommon word). It
> is not obvious what "programming" refers to. And even when it goes badly
> wrong, people who don't expand the "Details" section shouldn't ever need
> to know that there is such a thing as "aptdaemon" -- it should be hard-
> working but anonymous.
>
> Integration with apport is an excellent idea, but we still need to
> explain what went wrong with the user's goal, e.g. "there was a problem
> installing “Specimen Font Previewer”".

This cannot be done on the aptdaemon level, since we don't know any
applications - only packages. But you could use a custom error message
in software-center (the application is stored in the Transaction meta
data by software-center).

Each transaction has got an error (code) and
error_details attribute. The first one only contains an enum of the
error type. So it won't be hard to implement custom error dialogs. You
could even reuse the secondary text and only replace the
header, so that the header for all errors reads "Failed to install
Specimen" and only the secondary text would explain what went wrong.

By the way I am one of the founding members of the blatant errors and
awkward grammar team in Launchpad :)