Question

Does anyone know about an opensource list of most common error messages?

My motivation for this question, although I am adept at writing code, English is not my mother tongue.

And, such a list (somewhat, like all those free icons on the net) will shorten the last stages of my development, And good (and fun) error messages are part of a good UI, I think.

One more motivation, I might get some ideas as to things I ought to check and forgot about.

Common scenarios:

• No authorization
• More Info
• Missing details
• Missmatch user/pass

Answer 1

I do not know of anything that is exactly like what you ask for; a repository of generic error messages. If you need error messages for system errors, you should look at errno.h; each of those errors has a brief description (check, for instance, the specification for errno.h, or perhaps the Linux version).

Another option would be to look at translation projects for existing open source software. For instance, check out the Translation Product‘s .pot files or the Ubuntu translation project; this will give you a lot of error messages and other strings to choose examples from. Another advantage is that you may be able to check out the translations into your native language to use as a sort of Rosetta stone, if you ever need clarification about something (though you appear to speak and write English well enough to post here, so I’m not sure if you need that).