Damages i18n has done?

Posted Dec 11, 2024 10:50 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Damages i18n has done? by taladar
Parent article: Debian opens a can of username worms

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