[Clirr-devel] message strings in reports

[Simon K. <si...@ec...>]

Hi,

Currently, when api differences are reported, the check generating the
report manually builds the difference "description" string. This has a
couple of problems.

Firstly, multi-language support can't be done. It would be nice to be
able to provide clirr reports in languages other than english (German
and French translations shouldn't be too hard to arrange :-).

More importantly, the current messages tend to be terse. In many cases,
I think it would be desirable for differences to be able to reference a
longer description of the problem, eg "for more info, see issue #7 in
the clirr docs", where clirr documentation has a couple of paragraphs
explaining why issue #7 is a binary incompatibility, or why it is a
warning and under what circumstances problems can occur.

I propose that some kind of "ReportMessage" class be created that is
capable of reading messages from an external resource file. When checks
report differences, they indicate just "Message #7" rather than build
the exact string. The ApiDifference class can then use the ReportMessage
class to build the "short description" (potentially using the standard
Java string interpolation syntax of {0} and {1} to insert class and
method/field names). The message code can also be used to reference an
external doc that describes the problem in more detail.


Thoughts?

Regards,

Simon