Bug#1064394: release-notes: English language output for the commands into script session
Franco wrote:
> Dear Debian Documentation Project staff,
>
> I want to suggest to add a sentence like the following to the §4.4.1
> "Recording the session" paragraph. ¹ Below the "script" command:
>
> --- BEGIN of the statement ---
I like this idea; but it might work better if we turn things around
and start with the possible problem before offering the solution.
> " If you are comfortable with English language it's strongly
> recommended that you run the following command as soon as you start
> the 'script' session:
> # LC_ALL=C.UTF-8; LANGUAGE=; export LC_ALL LANGUAGE
>
> This will allow you to get command output messages in English into
> the script session. By doing so, it will help you for searching the
> web, during discussions or to submit a bug report."
> --- END of the statement ---
A rephrased version:
If you use a non-English locale during the upgrade, any progress
or error messages are likely to be translated, so in the event of
problems it may be difficult to get assistance from the Internet,
or to submit a bug report. If you are comfortable using English
then it is strongly recommended that you run the following command
at the start of your 'script' session:
# LC_ALL=C.UTF-8; LANGUAGE=; export LC_ALL LANGUAGE
This will give you command output in English.
(Or do we also need to warn users to say "yes" and not "si"?)
> This change it has been discussed on debian-user mailing-list here. ²
> The syntax of the command was designed to be portable to all shells,
> csh included.
I'm sorry, but if you're doing vital root-privileged sysadmin tasks
under csh, things have already gone badly wrong; the instructions in
the Release Notes all assume a Bourne-family shell. For instance, the
immediately preceding line invoking screen with a 2>~/foo redirection*
won't work on csh (tested with bookworm's tcsh).
So I'm not sure there's any point using anything longer than:
# export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=
(But doing it separately from starting "script" does make sense, if
only to give us room for an explanation.)
> ¹ https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/release-notes/upgrading.en.html#recording-the-session
> ² https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2024/02/msg00562.html
I don't think the Release Notes ever mention the fact that we assume
a Bourne shell, but if you boot into an initrd rescue shell expecting
it to be csh then your day hasn't finished getting worse.
[--just as I was about to hit SEND:--]
> Could I suggest that the syntax of "script" command in the "4.4.1.
> Recording the session" section it should be:
>
> # script -T ~/upgrade-trixie-step.time -a ~/upgrade-trixie-step.script
Ah, yes, avoiding the tricky redirection syntax (worthwhile even if
we don't care about csh). But if we're assuming this is already a
root session, "~/foo" will put that log in /root/; maybe we should
say that instead of using tilde-expansion?
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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