Bug #75329 error message reference lacks basic information
Submitted: 29 Dec 2014 14:25 Modified: 30 Jan 2015 8:02
Reporter: teo teo Email Updates:
Status: Won't fix Impact on me:
None 
Category:MySQL Server: Documentation Severity:S2 (Serious)
Version:all OS:Any
Assigned to: Paul DuBois CPU Architecture:Any

[29 Dec 2014 14:25] teo teo
Description:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/error-messages-client.html

Error message reference lacks the most basic information. For each error, the meaning of the %s, %d etc parameters should be specified.

For example:
"Error: 2003 (CR_CONN_HOST_ERROR)
Message: Can't connect to MySQL server on '%s' (%d)"
No clue is given about what the %d number means (nor %s for that matter but it may be obvious that %s is the host, though nothing should be considered obvious in documentation)

How to repeat:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/error-messages-client.html

Error message reference lacks the most basic information. For each error, the meaning of the %s, %d etc parameters should be specified.

For example:
"Error: 2003 (CR_CONN_HOST_ERROR)
Message: Can't connect to MySQL server on '%s' (%d)"
No clue is given about what the %d number means (nor %s for that matter but it may be obvious that %s is the host, though nothing should be considered obvious in documentation)
[30 Dec 2014 4:59] MySQL Verification Team
Hello Teo Teo,

Thank you for the report.

Thanks,
Umesh
[30 Jan 2015 8:02] Erlend Dahl
[27 Jan 2015 9:02] Stefan Hinz

Error messages are imported from the server sources and inserted into the
documentation. For more information, inspect the definitions in the source,
as hinted to in this sentence: "The Message values correspond to the error
messages that are listed in the libmysql/errmsg.c file. %d and %s represent
numbers and strings, respectively, that are substituted into the messages
when they are displayed."
[30 Jan 2015 10:09] matteo sisti sette
That's f***ing ridiculous. 
If you want this part of the documentation to be built automatically from source code you should place comments into the source with some sort of convention so that they can be retrieved.
"Look at the source code and figure out by yourself is by no way acceptable documentation, and it's unbelievable that you don't see it.