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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 15:10:20 +0100
From: u-wsnj@...ey.se
To: musl@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: libintl: stubs or working functions?
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:38:57AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > msgid "Permission denied"
> > msgstr "asdf@# lkjk^& (EPERM)"
>
> I'm a bit undecided on this. It's reasonable to ask people reporting
> bugs to set their locale temporarily to something the project
> maintainers understand (typically English). It's also pretty easy to
> grep the .po files or use Google Translate to figure out what the
> message says.
>
> If users with a non-English locale would find those kind of messages
> helpful and non-obtrusive (is latin text in the middle of non-latin
> obtrusive? perhaps, depending on font?), I'm not opposed to having
> them, but I don't think they should be added against the desire of
> most users out of an interest in making it easier to interpret bug
> reports for us or for other upstreams.
As an application user I am motivated to be able to report problems as
exactly as possible.
As a "library user" (either as a packager, application developer,
support staff or something else) I find it unfortunate/disturbing to
have to "guess" the actual error name, even when a message is in a well
known language like English.
This is mostly very easy but sometimes less certain, with less usual
errors and/or different C libraries which may contain different English
strings/spellings too.
An error-specific indentifier should IMHO always be present
in every message, not translated to a "natural" language with the
intention to be translatable back with more or less pain.
IOW I'd like to always have the canonical errname in the output,
in English too.
This would make error messages easier and more robust to interpret.
This would also make cut-n-paste web searches for an application problem
more reliable, with a better chance to see reports made from different
locales and to avoid unrelated natural language.
Regards and btw thanks for musl,
Rune
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