From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 16 01:10:17 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id BAA29260 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 01:10:17 -0700 Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id BAA29240 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 01:10:07 -0700 Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id JAA13064; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 09:10:01 +0100 Received: by sax.sax.de (8.6.11/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id JAA15613; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 09:10:00 +0100 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.9) id IAA24201; Mon, 16 Oct 1995 08:37:42 +0100 From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199510160737.IAA24201@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: A couple problems in FreeBSD 2.1.0-950922-SNAP To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 08:37:42 +0100 (MET) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: <199510160111.KAA05393@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Oct 16, 95 10:41:46 am X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Length: 1448 Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk As Michael Smith wrote: > > I'll second that 8) The AIX/OS2 etc standard of "(reference) message" > is still my favorite - the messages are usually verbose and at least vaguely > informative, and the numbers mean that when a luser is reading it to you > over the 'phone, that's all you need, coz you can look it up locally. > > (And thus it doesn't matter what language the message is in, because you > can regenerate it at will with the catalog lookup tool) The smtp error message is not intended for trained IBM personell that is good enough in Japanese to even understand the Japanese error messages :), it's intended for the _sender_ of the message. So unless IBM is in the belief that all the world is AIX trained personell (maybe they're really believing this, who knows? :-), this attitude is not very useful. Even for me, a mailer error message in German looks weird. I've only been picking their mailer daemon as an example i knew; i'm sure there are more hidden gotchas. SINIX systems (the Unix of a very minor German hardware vendor) prefer to ask you for "Anmeldename:" and "Kennwort:". Imagine the bunch of UUCP scripts that will stumple across this... :-) (Even though it's perhaps more useful than said SMTP errors. They are _never_ intended for a local user.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)