Kaixo! On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 02:58:27PM -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> not mine, but I heard that: "A japanese system administrator > should be able to read the error messages in japanese." It depends of the level of the error message. You don't imply that kernel oops messages should be localized into japanese? Well, the *console* should be only for that: kernel messages, and error messages when mounting root partition or when loading support for real text. Then, all the rest, could indeed go, not trough the console, but trough a *local text terminal*, handled by a user-space program that will properly display text. Yes, error messages about printer being out of paper, network being down, etc. could be in japanese; but, for me, that is not at the basic console level. > and deep > down there we all know that it's true. Any argument against > that, has its roots in "we are not technically advanced enough to > get there yet". Yes; that is also the reason; it is because the displays like a PC video card or an old vt100 trough an rs232 connection are unable to display anything but ascii (or cp437/iso-8859-1 if we are lucky) that the distinction between the bare console messages and normal text messages is needed. When the most cheapo PC video card will come embedded with a chip that has in its ROM a rendering engine of the quality of pango, and quality fonts for all unicode encoded scripts of the world, then we could indeed think about translating even the kernel messages; but currently that is not possible. (and also, aside from English, I don't know a single language that has translated all existing user programs, and imho those are more important to localize than kernel message like: usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3 You should think of kernel messages on console as a kind of logfile, some /var/log/console, that is possible even when writing on /var/log is not possible. kernel messages on console are useful when your video card isn't recognized at all (not even in text mode), and you need some to know why, and plug another device with a display, dating back from the 1980's or even before. Note that, from a use point of vue, having the current functionality on the kernel or through a user-space program makes no difference at all; but a user-level support allows *more functionality* that is currently simply impossible. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]
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