Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 9 Apr 2003 19:07:00 -0300 | From | Werner Almesberger <> | Subject | Re: kernel support for non-english user messages |
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Matti Aarnio wrote: > In the old days of big iron beasts, there used to be multivolume > binders full of system messages,
... and in the modern age, we have Perl and regexps :-)
Nobody is going to maintain all the translations of "his" component, so you might as well let the translators try to play catch-up, and track changes in their regexp database.
For the kernel, we don't have the mechanisms of big companies or monolithic projects to just funnel all changes of a specific kind through a single channel, where somebody slaps a unique message-id on them.
Granted, you can have multi-level messages (like the VMS-style %facility-severity-ident), but that only buys some time. And you still either need a message catalog or include the plain text in the message as well.
The message catalog only approach wouldn't work well for the kernel, yielding either too many files or patch congestion on central message files. Think of Documentation/Configure.help and the relative frequency of changes.
And if you have the (English) plain text, you almost always also have your unique message key. At least unique enough for translation. So perhaps it's time to forget the traditional solutions, and think of a more distributed approach.
- Werner
-- _________________________________________________________________________ / Werner Almesberger, Buenos Aires, Argentina wa@almesberger.net / /_http://www.almesberger.net/____________________________________________/ - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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