Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 17:51:22 -0500 From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> To: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) Cc: wollman@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman), freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com Subject: Re: CVS stuff Message-ID: <9501172251.AA25223@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <9501172230.AA28575@cs.weber.edu> References: <9501172109.AA24927@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> <9501172230.AA28575@cs.weber.edu>
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<<On Tue, 17 Jan 95 15:30:28 MST, terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) said: > 1) If Pierro, for instance, takes over maintenance of csh, BZZZZT! Individuals don't maintain programs, the FreeBSD community at large does. > It seems to me that this embedding of translation facilities in the > program maintainers is wrong. If the maintainer can't understand the > error, then the maintainer should ask the person reporting the error > to use a particular locale and cause the error to occur again. Or > even better, put "Notice! use the C locale to generate error messages" > in the same place you put the maintainer's email address. That doesn't work. It's hard enough to diagnose hard-to-reproduce problems now, I don't want to make it any harder than it already is. > The whole point of an error message is to provide sufficient information > to the user that they don't *have* to contact the maintainer, IMO. I don't seem to be getting through to you, Terry, and I can't seem to understand what is so difficult about the idea that, in a distributed community of users dispersed throughout the world, it is more important to be able to communicate with other people about your problems than to have those problems reported in fifteen different languages. While we're at it: this is a volunteer effort. Who is going to sit down and perform the tedious (and, I believe, counterproductive) task of translating five gazillion error messages, in both user and kernel code, into some language or other, and then constantly watching for program changes to keep them up-to-date? I think the answer is `nobody'. There are /far/ more important things to do (like improving the existing documentation and fixing bugs), and---most significantly---there are /far/ more interesting things to do. > An > error message is a mechanism for reporting a condition over which the > user has control but the program does not. An error like: > Error: PI is 3.1415926 > Is useless, since what the hell is the user supposed to be able to do > about that? This is a phony straw-man. Try again, with a real example from a current program. > If the "Lingua Franca" of BSD is to be English, fine, but don't cloud > the air with BS and hand-waving instead of just stating the decision, > and if that *is* the decision, be prepared to back it. There isn't any ``decision'' to be made; that is the situation now, and any change would be counterproductive and unlikely in the extreme. You should be the one to talk about BS and hand-waving, Terry. -GAWollman -- Garrett A. Wollman | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ... wollman@lcs.mit.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance. Opinions not those of| It is a bond more powerful than absence. We like people MIT, LCS, ANA, or NSA| who like Shashish. - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant
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