One of the most frustrating aspects of working with ember as a newbie is trying to grok the errors and understand what is happening behind the scenes (aka the convention stuff) when something goes wrong. To this end it might be really handy to have a formal troubleshooting guide or documentation that lets users submit error messages or error codes and provide some jumping off point for further research or investigation into why something went wrong. Copying error messages into google search and poring over docs, and tangentially related JSFiddle examples still seems really primitive and labor intensive to me.
This might even be an interesting candidate for an example ember app. Conceptually one could even provide a direct link from within the debugging console or at least error codes that can easily be search in knowledge base system. Some of the alerts and asserts can be pretty confusing to the uninitiated. I am thinking that at minimum there would some linkage to API reference docs and some contextual explanation of what can cause the error message, links to best practices and common code patterns (or even anti-patterns). Perhaps even some contextual presentation of relevant unit test code, issue tracking systems, etc. It would also encourage developers working on the core and error messages to organize or link error messages to accessible documentation infrastructure.
I recognize this might a bit ambitious of an ask. And there are certainly established sources of information (github issue tracking, stackoverflow, ember discourse forum, random blogs, etc). But it seems like collectively we are still in the dark of ages of error reporting for the novice programmer and user just trying to learn a framework or system. Providing even a modicum of context and links to further help could go a long way.
And given the fact that ember is still in a bit of flux until 1.0 release only exacerbates the confusion, trying to keep up with the change.
Maybe as a baby step, a heavily moderated category in this forum dedicated to this task?
Maybe this is a feature that could eventually be integrated with the Ember Chrome Extension (a really awesome tool by the way).
Thoughts?
Feel free to kill or close this thread if it is off topic or posted in the wrong area. Meta seemed like an appropriate area.