Bug#1064394: release-notes: English language output for the commands into script session
On 21/02/24 at 16:00, Justin B Rye wrote:
I like this idea; but it might work better if we turn things around
and start with the possible problem before offering the solution.
Yes, my English is so scholastic.
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.
I agree
(Or do we also need to warn users to say "yes" and not "si"?)
It shouldn't be necessary, if the user is comfortable with English,
already he should expect this. However end users behavior is unpredictable …
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).
Yes, the redirection of only stderr is not allowed in csh but with the
new "script" command syntax this will be solved:
# script -T ~/upgrade-trixie-step.time -a ~/upgrade-trixie-step.script
So I'm not sure there's any point using anything longer than:
# export LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=
Yes, but what's wrong if we have a syntax portable to all shells? If
available.
(But doing it separately from starting "script" does make sense, if
only to give us room for an explanation.)
Sorry I missed the sense, what explanation?
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.
Again, only if available, why don't we use a portable syntax to all shells?
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?
I'm for tilde-expansion I find it more elegant and more widespread use
for referring to the home directory.
--
Franco Martelli
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