Date: Mon, 16 Oct 1995 08:37:42 +0100 (MET) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Subject: Re: A couple problems in FreeBSD 2.1.0-950922-SNAP Message-ID: <199510160737.IAA24201@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199510160111.KAA05393@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Oct 16, 95 10:41:46 am
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As Michael Smith wrote: > > I'll second that 8) The AIX/OS2 etc standard of "(reference) message" > is still my favorite - the messages are usually verbose and at least vaguely > informative, and the numbers mean that when a luser is reading it to you > over the 'phone, that's all you need, coz you can look it up locally. > > (And thus it doesn't matter what language the message is in, because you > can regenerate it at will with the catalog lookup tool) The smtp error message is not intended for trained IBM personell that is good enough in Japanese to even understand the Japanese error messages :), it's intended for the _sender_ of the message. So unless IBM is in the belief that all the world is AIX trained personell (maybe they're really believing this, who knows? :-), this attitude is not very useful. Even for me, a mailer error message in German looks weird. I've only been picking their mailer daemon as an example i knew; i'm sure there are more hidden gotchas. SINIX systems (the Unix of a very minor German hardware vendor) prefer to ask you for "Anmeldename:" and "Kennwort:". Imagine the bunch of UUCP scripts that will stumple across this... :-) (Even though it's perhaps more useful than said SMTP errors. They are _never_ intended for a local user.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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