From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263838AbTDIVz2 (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 17:55:28 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263839AbTDIVz2 (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 17:55:28 -0400 Received: from almesberger.net ([63.105.73.239]:15373 "EHLO host.almesberger.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263838AbTDIVz1 (for ); Wed, 9 Apr 2003 17:55:27 -0400 Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 19:07:00 -0300 From: Werner Almesberger To: Matti Aarnio Cc: Frank Davis , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: kernel support for non-english user messages Message-ID: <20030409190700.H19288@almesberger.net> References: <3E93A958.80107@si.rr.com> <20030409080803.GC29167@mea-ext.zmailer.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20030409080803.GC29167@mea-ext.zmailer.org>; from matti.aarnio@zmailer.org on Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 11:08:03AM +0300 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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/____________________________________________/