On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 03:49:32PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones@redhat.com> wrote:
Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
There's a few coding style guidelines we've kind of informally agreed upon wrt to libvirt patches, and perhaps more that we ought to make decisions on. For the benefit of people sending patches I reckon its worth writing these down. So I'm attaching a proposed doc 'HACKING' in which we can detail the guidelines. And yes, we don't uniformly comply with these guidelines in all places....all the more reason to list them & fix cases where we don't comply :-)
5. Ensure any user visible strings are marked for translation
eg wrap all strings with _(...)
virXendError(xend, VIR_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR, _("domain information incomplete, missing domid"));
Translating error messages is a bad idea: (1) Naive users ignore error messages anyway. (2) It makes the error message much less useful when doing an internet search for solutions. (3) If an error message is posted to this list, it's much less useful if it isn't in English.
Hi Rich,
I've always heard that support for translatable diagnostics is an important feature.
While I'm no UI/internationalization expert, I would have thought that less-savvy users would need the messages more than others.
If a user is taking the time to report a bug to an English-speaking list and to include a precise diagnostic, they're probably clueful enough to translate any such message for us. At worst, since we have the .po files, we can look up the translation manually -- or just use an online translator.
If you look at glibc - all the strerror() stuff is translated, and we feed that into our own error messages. So if we didn't translate our own, we'd be giving users error messages which contain a mix of englissh and translated stuff. Our users have been very proactive about providing translations for our existing error messages, which suggests the translations are indeed important to them. Dan. -- |=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston. +1 978 392 2496 -=| |=- Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ -=| |=- Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/ -=| |=- GnuPG: 7D3B9505 F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 -=|