From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 18 18:43:23 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) id SAA04526 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 18 Jan 1995 18:43:23 -0800 Received: from is1.hk.super.net (jbeukema@is1.hk.super.net [202.14.67.232]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.9/8.6.6) with SMTP id SAA04499 for ; Wed, 18 Jan 1995 18:43:16 -0800 Received: by is1.hk.super.net id AA21236 (5.67b/IDA-1.5 for freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com); Thu, 19 Jan 1995 10:42:14 +0800 Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 10:42:13 +0800 (HKT) From: John Beukema To: jhs@regent.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: CVS stuff In-Reply-To: <199501182324.AAA10750@vector.eikon.e-technik.tu-muenchen.de> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Thu, 19 Jan 1995, Julian Howard Stacey wrote: > > From: John Beukema > > The `just' in `just by setting an alternate string table' > is over-simplification, it's not exactly fun work either, > > If you (John) want to do this massive, never ending, rather boring job > for free, I can only applaud your public spirit :-) > > > Further, before one invest too much time worrying about mere Latin alphabet > conversions, don't forget Cyrillic & Japanese Kanji, & 16 bit wchars etc :-) > > Personally I would only do it, > IF a firm waved many large denomination $$ at me ! > At which point I'd be delighted to, I might add :-) > > --- > Julian Stacey , > ( is a dial up ) > I think you are missing my point. I do not propose to do any translations of error messages unless I have the need for them. (Chinese would be helpful, however). To isolate the language dependent strings is good coding practice and most newer applications find it efficient in the long run. It is the same as defining constants instead of scatering 'magic numbers' in code. Messages can be changed as required. If someone needs Urdu messages, they can make their own string table and substitute it (or simplified Chinese, for that matter). Incidently, I like the "error 115 : File not found" approach. A customized shell version could bring up a help screen and present a page on error 115, if required. Although I will not volunteer to translate messages into 200 languages, I would be prepared to work on an English string table and move embedded messages from modules (a manageable number) to the string table. This would be a first step. jbeukema