Re: Do not touch l10n files
On Tuesday 20 May 2003 15:22, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> (Of course, this still doesn't answer the question of whether anyone
> would ever want or use locale support to be enabled during the initial
> boot sequence, such that the boot messages come up in the local
> language....)
You don't have a dad who cannot even pronounce kernel boot errors over the
phone, right?
Seriously:
If today's operating systems are not designed to provide full
internationalization, we should be ashamed of ourselves that we did not
manage to design them as such.
If whatever genius wants to mandate message catalogs into /usr/..., he does 1)
not understand the concepts of path hierarchies (/usr/local, /usr and / as an
example), and 2) imposes further barriers on the deployment of fully
internationalized systems.
To assume that system administrators must speak English is an arbitrary
limitation. Who would want to use a system with limits like 64 command line
arguments as a maximum, or a shared library chain limited to 2 dependencies?
Similar to the well-known 640kB comparison, those decisions will bring trouble
in the future.
A system design should be as flexible as possible, and in the case of message
catalogs, it's neither performance nor size that is hurt.
Each piece of software can have multiple interfaces, but the primary one
should always be accessible to everyone.
Josef
--
Play for fun, win for freedom.
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