Date: Tue, 17 Jan 95 15:30:28 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: wollman@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) Cc: wollman@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu, freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: CVS stuff Message-ID: <9501172230.AA28575@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <9501172109.AA24927@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> from "Garrett Wollman" at Jan 17, 95 04:09:09 pm
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> > What does siting message by number have to do with not citing message > > by English Message Text? !a => b? That's a logical fallacy. > > Because if you're trying to figure out what the !@#$%^ is wrong when > somebody complains, you need to know what the REAL message is. You > can either put the messages in English, so that everybody understands, > or you can stick on message numbers. Maybe I can put it in all caps, with spaces between the letters, because E V E R Y O N E U N D E R S T A N D S E N G L I S H I F I T I S S P O K E N L O U D L Y A N D S L O W L Y E N O U G H. Personally, I don't have any intrinsic objection to message numbers, if they are accompanied by text, if the intent is to index a catalog for a program maintainer. I'm probably in a minority here, even though this is exactly what exit codes are. > > It makes no sense to be able to display Russian, for instance, if none > > of the data on the system is Russian text! > > If you want some Russian text, you go into your editor and generate > it. I'm certain that Andrew has lots of Russian text. This does not > mean that it is a good idea to have system programs printing out > messages in languages which are not understood by the program > maintainers. It's no skin off my nose, but, I just want to be perfectly clear on what's being said here, so that I don't misunderstand. There are several implied assumptions in your statements: 1) The people having the problems will not be able to diagnose the problem from the error messages, even if they are in the user's native language (pretty shitty error messages, if you ask me). 2) The people having the problems have some way of contacting and communicating with the authors about the problems they are having (Stahlman's "everyone will be on the net", a demonstration of the failure of modern academia to live in the real world, where software is distributed on CDROM to people who don't even own modems). Now, these have several correlaries: 1) If Pierro, for instance, takes over maintenance of csh, then it is acceptable for an English spekear to type the command moose at a prompt, and instead of getting back the message moose: Command not found. he or she should get back the Italian equivalent, since it is more important that Pierro be able to resolve the problem for the person instead of the person being able to resolve the problem themselves. Same thing for: moose: bus error, core dumped. 2) If Andrew or some other Russian language speaker takes over maintenance of getty, then it's OK to see a KOI-8 version of: Login incorrect When most users are probably running ISO8859-1 fonts anyway, since as the maintainer he should be able to understand when a user is providing an invalid login/password so he can tell them, and KOI-8 encoded Russian "login failure" messages in their system log files. It seems to me that this embedding of translation facilities in the program maintainers is wrong. If the maintainer can't understand the error, then the maintainer should ask the person reporting the error to use a particular locale and cause the error to occur again. Or even better, put "Notice! use the C locale to generate error messages" in the same place you put the maintainer's email address. The whole point of an error message is to provide sufficient information to the user that they don't *have* to contact the maintainer, IMO. An error message is a mechanism for reporting a condition over which the user has control but the program does not. An error like: Error: PI is 3.1415926 Is useless, since what the hell is the user supposed to be able to do about that? If the "Lingua Franca" of BSD is to be English, fine, but don't cloud the air with BS and hand-waving instead of just stating the decision, and if that *is* the decision, be prepared to back it. Terry Lambert terry@cs.weber.edu --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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