Date: Fri, 9 Aug 1996 19:31:47 +0930 (CST) From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: hosokawa@mt.cs.keio.ac.jp, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: New L10N boot floppy for 2.1.5-RELEASE Message-ID: <199608091001.TAA03094@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <28544.839581871@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Aug 9, 96 02:11:11 am
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Jordan K. Hubbard stands accused of saying:
> 3. The message catalog stuff you did for sysinstall looks reasonable,
> though with the usual effect of making the user interaction
> completely incomprehensible if you're trying to read through or
> trace the code by eye. :-) Since you have an english message
A couple of possible ways to ease the pain of message catalogs :
Use _really_obnoxious_ constants for your catalog indices :
MC_YES
MC_RETRY
MC_FTP_ERROR_OCURRED_WHILE_CONNECTING
Use a translation-oriented catalog lookup; ie. something like :
mp1 = translate("FTP Error");
mp2 = translate(strerror(errno));
mp3 = translate("an error occurred retrieving %s",filename);
error_dialog(mp1,mp2,mp3);
multifree(mp1,mp2,mp3);
where the translate() function looks up its argument string in the
catalog, replaces it with the corresponding translation to the
local language if it finds it, and then sprintf's the remaining arguments
in. (note that reordering the arguments is left as an exercise to the
masochistic; SunOS provides an argument index option for *printf which
makes the reordering task much simpler).
For the latter approach to work nicely, you need a tool to check your
source and bitch about messages that aren't in the catalog seperate
from the compilation process though.
> Jordan
--
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au [[
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