zonemaster
Investigate to provide long messages to be used in GUIs
Today we provide short messages (error messages, warnings etc). We need to provide long messages too to be helpful for the users. This issue is to investigate how that could be done. Requirements:
- It should be possible to provide links in the long messages.
- It should be possible to reuse the long messages in different clients, e.g. different GUI implementations.
I don't think verbose messages belong in the testing engine. You should probably look into having messages in a separate dictionary module, pairing the messages and translations with the shorter message codes available in the "raw" JSON output.
We have preliminary decided to add extended messages and that they belong to the Engine component.
I would advise you to have the engine part of Zonemaster as slim as possible. This provides stability as the concern is only about testing, and not any part of user experience. Any application that needs to provide the user with a good experience can provide this as much as they need.
The bonus of this is that the engine will have more exact releases only based on testing. Not all users care about user experience, only about a good quality domain test.
As a user of the library, I expect a new release to be about testing, and stability and quality when performing tests, and not about other stuff.
The engine can be split up in several parts to make this easy. The translations and messaging can easily be shipped as a separate Perl module if you expect a lot of changes. Any text changes will then minimise the impact of the test engine.