Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 10, 2024 11:14 UTC (Tue) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: Damages i18n has done? by raven667
Parent article: Debian opens a can of username worms

That only really works if the parameters in the error message (e.g. filenames, ports,...) do not matter to finding others with the problem though.

Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 10, 2024 11:46 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (4 responses)

The well-worn solution has messages that look like %FOO-PLORT-12345:"filename","example.com","2001:db8:1::42/64"%. The idea is that you look up %FOO-PLORT-12345 in your catalogue of possible messages, and get told that it's "could not download {1} over HTTP from https://{2}/ (resolved IP {3})". You can then fill in the parameters (by hand, back in the day, computer can do it now), and discover what the error meant.

Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 11, 2024 9:45 UTC (Wed) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (3 responses)

While that does seem like a good solution to the issue I can't say I have ever encountered a program using that in 20+ years of professional Linux administration.

Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 11, 2024 10:50 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

The UNIX world never went this way; I encountered it interacting with mainframes and minicomputers, back 30-odd years ago.

Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 11, 2024 12:13 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

That sounds exactly like what I was thinking of - of course, using a database, there was a MESSAGES file which the error function searched - keyed on message id and language, then it printed the appropriate error message for the locale. Prefixed by the message id, to make it easy to search for / report a problem. If you're dealing with a support team who speak a different language, the message id makes much more sense than the error message.

Cheers,
Wol

Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 11, 2024 18:42 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I've seen this standard in various vendor software, eg Cisco IOS and variants use a similar kind of system

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios-xml/ios/16_xe/s...
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/ios/12_2/sem2/syste...

found an example from some IBM system that is this style where every log is numbered

https://publibz.boulder.ibm.com/epubs/pdf/ispzmc90.pdf

grabbing one at random ISRB0001 is searchable and leads to further docs https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.4.0?topic=codes-ispf-me... which would be a searchable tag even if the text of the message was localized or changed between versions