Re: i18n and internal errors

M.M. Kettenis
2005-02-15T02:10:45Z

"Eli Zaretskii" <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> Mark gave 2 reasons for not translating internal errors:
>
> . end users should not see these messages
> . having them translated makes it difficult to fix bugs
>
> If I understand these reasons as Mark meant, they actually say: if an
> end user sees and reports such a message in translated form, those of
> us who don't understand the translated message will have difficulty
> finding and fixing the bug.

Yup, that's what I meant.

> If that's what Mark meant, then he obviously says that end users
> _will_ see these messages. Messages that end users see should be
> translated, so that the users will understand them easily. Fatal
> messages should certainly be understood unequivocally, because it's
> crucial that the user understands the situation on which she is asked
> to act (dump core, continue, etc.)

Hmm, that's a pretty darn convincing argument.

> As for the difficulty in fixing the bugs, the fatal messages typically
> include a file name and a line number which point to the place where
> the bug was caught. I think that alleviates some of the difficulties.

Although line numbers might be a bit off compared to the current CVS version or even compared to the release.

> Also, it is customary for users to translate the messages into English
> when reporting bugs (a case in point is messages from the OS utilities
> that have some relevance to the bug being reported), since the users
> generally understand that English is a better language to talk to
> maintainers.

So we should update the bug reporting instructions to instruct users to run gdb with env LC_ALL="C". Hmm, hopefully that doesn't make the bug
disappear.

Mark