Merge lp://qastaging/~sergiusens/snapcraft/yaml-tabs into lp://qastaging/~snappy-dev/snapcraft/core

I think we need a UX opinion here. The \t character is not visible, so it could be hard to find. And that's assuming that the user knows what is \t and about parsing tokens. We are targeting package maintainers here, so maybe that's safe to assume.

I understand that with yaml, the leading spaces are important so we can't just strip them.

The alternative I see is to show a more useful message saying that X line on the yaml starts with an empty space, but that would mean catching and parsing the errors, or modifying the parser. Both alternatives suck.

How hard would it be to show the file name and line number in the error?
Do we have somebody from UX to ask this kind of things?

On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Leo Arias <email address hidden> wrote:

> I think we need a UX opinion here. The \t character is not visible, so it
> could be hard to find. And that's assuming that the user knows what is \t
> and about parsing tokens. We are targeting package maintainers here, so
> maybe that's safe to assume.
>
> I understand that with yaml, the leading spaces are important so we can't
> just strip them.
>

Right, stripping a tab might bring in the problem of multiline sequences
being incorrectly parsed.

>
> The alternative I see is to show a more useful message saying that X line
> on the yaml starts with an empty space, but that would mean catching and
> parsing the errors, or modifying the parser. Both alternatives suck.
>

This may be doable, line number and line context?

How hard would it be to show the file name and line number in the error?
>

Line number, easy, file name easy but I don't think it is necessary as it
is a SnapcraftYaml specific Error

> Do we have somebody from UX to ask this kind of things?
>

Mark :-)

I think this is good enough to get started, but we should probably design errors more holistically at some point. But I don't think we have enough to start that yet. And people rarely depend on them.

agree.