Node: Make warnings more beginner-friendly

[jhnns]

This issue came up while discussing #11642

The problem with the warnings emitted by process.emitWarning is that they provide little information about the context or how to get more information. Unless the user knows about the cli flags like --trace-warnings or the warning API, there is no clue on how to proceed. A simple solution would be to append a short explanation like Use the --trace-warnings command line flag to get a full stack trace of this warning. if the flag is not set.

[jhnns]

It's also surprising that the warnings are prefixed with (${process.release.name}:${process.pid}). This makes sense when the output of multiple processes is piped into one destination, but it can be confusing in development mode, when the output is read by a human. To me, for instance, it was not clear that the number after : was the process id. I confused it with a line number. And you can only know that by guessing or reading node's source code 😁

[jhnns]

Related discussion: #9516

[joyeecheung]

About the format for deprecations: I think adding a URL to anchors in https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/master/doc/api/deprecations.md (or on the website once they get rendered) could be more helpful(if stderr is TTY, maybe).

The explanation of the format can be added to that document too (along with how to --trace-deprecation and stuff).

[sam-github]

wrt. the idea of adding anchor URLs to node's deprecations page, note that the deprecation API is deliberately exported for use by thirdparty modules, so changes to make it work better for node users can't be too node-specific.

[seishun]

@sam-github Which I think is a reason _not_ to export the deprecation API.

Otherwise providing a URL in the deprecation message is a great idea. Listing all the deprecation-related flags would take up too much space.

[jhnns]

Otherwise providing a URL in the deprecation message is a great idea

👍

Listing all the deprecation-related flags would take up too much space.

Seems reasonable. I'm just asking for a hint on how to proceed.

[sam-github]

@jhnns the way to proceed is to PR an improvement to util.deprecate that includes useful information. People will have lots of comments, that's a good thing.

It may be that the changes are too large, and aren't backwards compatible. That's OK, if there is agreement that the messaging is much improved, then you'll just have to fork the util.deprecate API, make one in lib/internal/... to be used only by Node, and the external API can be left there, unchanged.

See: https://github.com/nodejs/node/pull/12631#issuecomment-297524342

Sorry for all the cross-linking, but the conversation spawns three threads ATM.

[jasnell]

One possibility here is to add a new option to process.emitWarning() for additional detail. This can be added to the warning object emitted by process.on('warning') using a detail property and can be included in the default stderr output for all warnings. This would cover deprecations and warnings of all sorts.

[jasnell]

Also note that the process.on('warning') API can easily be extended by third parties to provide additional capabilities. For instance, a module can easily attach a handler for DeprecationWarning that outputs the additional URL link.

[Trott]

Should this remain open? (I can't tell.)

[bnoordhuis]

Another two months passed with no activity. I'll close this out.