Re: [PATCH 36/38] vfs: Add a sample program for the new mount API [ver #10]

Posted Aug 5, 2018 19:55 UTC (Sun) by hmh (subscriber, #3838)
Parent article: Re: [PATCH 36/38] vfs: Add a sample program for the new mount API [ver #10]

When you can afford to go the long way, and you really need the messages l10n'd, there is the old message catalog thing IBM did for their big iron since the 80's, if not earlier: every message has a (large but somewhat human-friendly) unique identifier, that always precedes it in all caps.

And you'd get large (printed and bound) volumes with full catalogs of all of those codes with detailed information pertaining to that message, etc.

It is not cheap in the least, you need to care for those as if they were ABIs. But it does get the job properly done, since the message ids are even better search anchors than their English reading...

Re: [PATCH 36/38] vfs: Add a sample program for the new mount API [ver #10]

Posted Aug 9, 2018 10:30 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Okay, this is a database program, but Pick internationalises itself with a database table of all its messages.

So you search the table for your message, then find out what the message ID means. Pretty much the same as the IBM approach :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Re: [PATCH 36/38] vfs: Add a sample program for the new mount API [ver #10]

Posted Aug 9, 2018 13:48 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

Well, IBM made sure the user-visible message was always prefixed by the "catalog id" in roman characters, so you could understand it using a paper translation catalog even if the machine wrote it out in gibberish-klingon-with-the-wrong-codepage...

In other words, user-consumable error codes were sort of unique per message/meaning, always displayed along with the error message, and always in the same format.

But yeah, it is the same basic idea indeed.