often new gentoo users past the two lines above this sentence, that contain just a useless FAILED message. so please either remove the 2 lines, put a line above them like "^^^^paste the error above here ^^^^" whatever, or the best solution imo would be a better docu of error pasting with a link in the err message to it. like the typical "howto smart questions", a "howto paste compile errors" and link to it in err message as i said. <personal_note> gentoo is more and more a beginners distro (with gui stuff, and so on) , and channels are floodet with crap like this, so please get portage more friendly for irc ;) <personal_note\>
I'd like: ^^^^^ when asking for help, include the error(s) above this line ^^^^^
I think people who don't get the current message would ignore any more "user-friendly" message as well, I mean we can't be much more explicit than "don't post this message". Can't really do much if people don't read the stuff.
The problem might be that there are exclamation marks in front of these lines, so people think: "That's got to be the most important part of the log." Perhapps one could color the phrase "post the topmost build error" in red. Still I think the suggested line before the portage error handler would be helpful to people who don't have a clue what a "build error" might be, so they at least start looking for it at the right place.
Can we WONTFIX this? People who can't be bothered to read won't read no matter what, the message is damn explicit as for what to post, as already said in comment #2.
There will always be some beginner that pastes the wrong thing somewhere. If we had some official Gentoo documentation about interpreting build errors, then we might print a link to it when not in --quiet mode. We already do something similar when emerge exits due to blockers, since beginners are known to ask questions about that extremely frequently.
If someone can write up a nice howto for this I'll add it to our project page and add a link in the message.
