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Time to internationalize the kernel?Time to internationalize the kernel?Posted Apr 17, 2003 10:54 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)Parent article: Time to internationalize the kernel? Why not put in, instead, something like "<2.12345>"? Assigning a number to an error message sounds like a good idea: in some systems when the user got an error message like this, he went to the bookshelf, took the appropriate book and looked up the error message by its number.
But with Linux, one usually doesn't go to the bookshelf, but puts the text of the error message into Google's search field to get information about the error. And this method works quite well. But imagine, if I get an error message from the kernel in, let's say, Hungarian. How many hits would I get from Google for the Hungarian message? Not much, and very much less than if I would have searched for the original English message in the first place. And there are some even smaller languages out there...
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Time to internationalize the kernel? Posted Apr 23, 2003 12:14 UTC (Wed) by mwilck (guest, #1966) [Link] > How many hits would I get from Google for the Hungarian message?> Not much Exactly. However this applies just as well to messages from other parts of the system, not the kernel alone. Actually, it applies to anything where language is used for human-machine interaction. Think of menu items: If you run a non-English environment, you'll hardly be able to submit a meaningful bug report because you can't tell which GUI elements you clicked on. From this perspective, I18n was a bad idea right from the start. Unfortunately, it's impossible to turn back the wheel ... but please, don't put it into the kernel.
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