Re: localisation in system wide daemons
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:13:58AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Michelle Konzack wrote:
> > Am 2007-01-12 07:16:12, schrieb Christian Perrier:
> > > Could you explain us your perception of the harm caused by this?
> > This peoples will ask you for help and send all the logfiles maybe
> > in arabic, hindu or africaan.
> So you ask them to translate or rerun the program with an appropriate
> locale. Being able to speak all of the languages that Debian is in
> isn't a requirement to help anymore than knowing english should be[1]
> a requirement to administer one's own system.
Translations are not necessarily reversible; this depends heavily on both
the quality of the translation and the quality of the original messages.
And logged errors are not necessarily reproducible on demand.
AFAICS, post-processing of log messages would be the most reliable method to
give admins localized logs while also making it feasible for upstreams to
support user requests. Any problems that would make it hard to post-process
English logs for localization would apply n-fold to post-processing
non-English logs for translation back to English.
For best results, we would have a logging protocol that logs a message ID
plus arguments, so that formatting into English /or/ into other languages
would follow the same, sscanf-free process. :)
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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