On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 03:49:32PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote: > "Richard W.M. Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -=| -- Libvir-list mailing list Libvir-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list