Messages in this thread |  | | From | (Brian Blackmore) | Subject | Re: Jive -> Kernel (International Linux) (fwd) | Date | 19 Jan 1997 15:43:03 -0000 |
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Stephan Meyer <sensei@munich.netsurf.de> wrote: >On Sat, 18 Jan 1997, Philip Blundell wrote: >> Frankly, I'm not sure that the idea is particularly worthwhile, but we'll >> see... >> >> P. >>
>You would be crying out for multi-language support, if the linux kernel >gave messages in German.
>I thought about a text file, that would contain language-specific >messages. Perhaps, it could be integrated with the linux kernel. I >wouldn't mind the added size, but you could just disable it, too. >The kernel would look for it at boot-time and would parse it, if present.
There would be two problems with maintaining such a file:
1) Keeping it up to date with the latest kernels, new error messages would not appear in most languages until at least weeks after a kernel release and since new errors are the most likely to occur the language bit would be useless.
2) If an error does occur in such a file then the kernel could end up producing the *wrong* error message, this could waste weeks of searching for the wrong thing.
I work in an environment where the only error messages you get are
Subsystem-Name PI H'83 Module 14 Fault 128
And you end up looking the meaning of the fault up in the documentation. During development the documentation isn't always up to date or is sometimes plain wrong. A language translation file would basically be doing the same thing, I think this is a bad idea.
-- Brian http://www.wonderland.org/~eternal/
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