warning messages about non-issues

[Saxonis]

1. Installed Qt WebEngine locales directory not found at location [...]. Trying application directory...

That's OK since I didn't install translations.

2. Qt WebEngine locales directory not found at location [...]. Trying fallback directory... Translations MAY NOT not be correct.

Same as above.

3. You are not currently authenticated with Nexus. Please do so under Settings -> Nexus.

I don't want to authenticate with Nexus; I prefer to use MO2 offline. I don't think there's anything to be warned about it.

The last message was shown after I installed a mod I downloaded from ModDB.

It seems to be displayed for almost everything I try to install with MO2: log

4. [fomodinstallerdialog.cpp:919] Plugin "..." is the only plugin specified in group "..." which permits selection of at most one plugin

Why is that a warning message ? It's perfectly valid to have such a group according to the standard FOMM XML schema.

[AnyOldName3]

1-3 are all issues for other people, and therefore sensible things to have warnings for. You may see them as non-issues, but you're not everyone. That's why they're warnings rather than errors.

4 may be a good thing to get rid of the warning for if the schema says it's fine, and demote it to a diagnostic/debug message. There's a chance it's there because there's another mod manager that can't cope with this situation even if the spec permits it, and it's there to warn people packaging their own mods for distribution who'll need to know if their mod isn't universally compatible.

[Saxonis]

1-2 are shown because the user has chosen not to install Translations and therefore he shouldn't be warned about this choice anymore.

3 is a serious issue: I don't understand why I have to be authenticated with Nexus in order to free my log from all these messages. Just look at this log and consider how many important messages I might have lost because MO2 repeatedly tells me to sign up with a specific hosting site. And what would it do if I did ? Why would MO2 tell Nexus which mods I'm installing offline ?

4 is neither a diagnostic nor debug; FOMM works fine with groups that have a single option and and therefore such a declaration should work fine with any mod manager that claims to be compatible with FOMM.

[AnyOldName3]

1-2 are shown because the user has chosen not to install Translations and therefore he shouldn't be warned about this choice anymore.

Again, this is your opinion, and you're not the main character of real life. If we consider another person, then this is exactly the kind of thing that is useful to have. Let's say someone appears on the issue tracker or Discord server asking why they can't pick a particular language from the dropdown that they know works on their other machine. With the warning, we can immediately see from their logs that they didn't install the translations. Without the warning, we have no idea what the problem is. Possibly this could be sorted out by having the installer write to a file that says the translations weren't installed, and we could log a single message that translations weren't installed, but it's such a niche complaint that there's no way it's worth our time when we're already stretched so thin, so you'd need to create that pull request yourself.

3 is a serious issue: I don't understand why I have to be authenticated with Nexus in order to free my log from all these messages. Just look at this log and consider how many important messages I might have lost because MO2 repeatedly tells me to sign up with a specific hosting site. And what would it do if I did ? Why would MO2 tell Nexus which mods I'm installing offline ?

You'll be pleased to know that you can look at the source code for MO2 and learn that it only asks the Nexus about mods you've told it you got from the Nexus, and only to check them for updates when you tell it to check for updates, or work out which mod a file came from when you told it to do that.

There has been discussion about moving the Nexus integration to a plugin and then you could elect not to install it and other sites could have plugins, too, but it's fairly deeply integrated into MO2 at the moment, and would require a fairly colossal amount of work. The most likely way this is going to happen is if another website wants to integrate with MO2 and hires a developer to make this change, so it really needs a serious Nexus competitor with actual money to appear.

4 is neither a diagnostic nor debug; FOMM works fine with groups that have a single option and and therefore such a declaration should work fine with any mod manager that claims to be compatible with FOMM.

What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How could you be so naive?

Most mod managers that claim FOMOD support don't follow the spec exactly, and also the spec's been updated since some of the mod managers last were. Sometimes they're more permissive than they're supposed to be, which is why MO2 logs some off-spec behaviour and attempts to deal with it as other mod managers do, and sometimes they're less permissive.

[Saxonis]

Thanks for your time! :1st_place_medal:

[DarkTl]

Wow. In this case, it's completely pointless to make the installation of translations optional.

Because spamming the warnings in console for eternity (instead of providing the ability to disable these specific warnings) will force people to install translations sooner or later, simply to finally get rid of the warnings.

[AnyOldName3]

If you want to submit a pull request to change the message so it just logs that the translations are missing once instead of several times, that would be fine, but you're missing the entire point of the warnings. They're not primarily there to tell the user that something's wrong and needs fixing (if they were, then they'd be errors) but instead there to tell MO2 developers looking at logs what's happening. If we let users choose to selectively disable warnings, then the logs don't do that anymore, and are useless.