FieldTrip meeting - 20131030

Today we discussed how to improve WARNINGs appearing on screen.

There are 5 different ways of giving information to users about the running of a code:

• silent: It is not communicated what happens
• print: Notifications are printed on screen. E.g.: “processing trials”
• warning once: A warning printed on the screen when it occurs first.
• warning: A warning printed on screen. E.g.: “Warning: no baseline correction”
• error: Error printed on screen and the process is terminated.

We agreed today about the following:

• we should use warning and error identifiers.
• We would also like to give more information about the warnings. As a general guideline, when a warning is implemented, there should also be a frequently asked question created which explains why the warning has been implemented. The warning identifiers could help the user to find the relevant FAQ. The FAQ should also have a 'warning' tag.
• By using identifiers, warnings can be switched off automatically in Matlab. Hence, 'warning once' will be not necessary.

See http://www.fieldtriptoolbox.org/tag/warning?do=showtag&tag=warning for pages with the warning tag.