Mercurial > hg > toybox
changeset 616:e6acd7fbbfee
A note on error messages and internationalization.
author | Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> |
---|---|
date | Sun, 01 Jul 2012 23:48:15 -0500 |
parents | 43489d673976 |
children | a3e014fdeb35 |
files | www/design.html |
diffstat | 1 files changed, 20 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) [+] |
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--- a/www/design.html Sat Jun 30 16:31:37 2012 -0500 +++ b/www/design.html Sun Jul 01 23:48:15 2012 -0500 @@ -263,4 +263,24 @@ <p>The reason to pick "unsigned" is that way we're 8-bit clean by default.</p> +<p><h3>Error messages and internationalization:</h3></p> +<p>Error messages are extremely terse not just to save bytes, but because we +don't use any sort of _("string") translation infrastructure.</p> + +<p>Thus "bad -A '%c'" is +preferable to "Unrecognized address base '%c'", because a non-english speaker +can see that -A was the problem, and with a ~20 word english vocabulary is +more likely to know (or guess) "bad" than the longer message.</p> + +<p>The help text might someday have translated versions, and strerror() +messages produced by perror_exit() and friends can be expected to be +localized by libc. Our error functions also prepend the command name, +which non-english speakers can presumably recognize already.</p> + +<p>An enventual goal is UTF-8 support, although it isn't a priority for the +first pass of each command. (All commands should at least be 8-bit clean.)</p> + +<p>Locale support isn't currently a goal; that's a presentation layer issue, +X11 or Dalvik's problem.</p> + <!--#include file="footer.html" -->