On Tue, 2007-11-27 at 23:24 +0000, Peter TB Brett wrote: > Hi folks, > > At long hiatus, I've produced another lengthy blog post on libgeda > development. It's at > > http://www.peter-b.co.uk/blog/2007/11/error-reporting-handling-in-libgeda.html > > and reproduced below for your convenience. I'd be interested in your > comments. > > Regards, > > Peter >
<snip, deleted a lot of sensible stuff here > > - Ideally, the error messages used for GErrors emitted from libgeda should be > translated. This means libgeda will need to use gettext. > > As usual, I'd be interested to hear peoples' thoughts on this. Please let me > know on the -dev list or by e-mail. > Hi Peter and all, Having read your blog-post and the e-mail, IMHO this all is a Good Thing (TM). Having contributed with the Dutch translation of gschem (and currently busy with pcb, every once in a while translating some strings during sparse free time) I have always felt a bit ambiguous about translating error messages. On the one hand, translating error messages to the native tongue (eye) gives a better understanding for the user what happened in the application during run-time. On the other hand, reporting a error message translated into [Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, ..., Dutch] on geda-dev doesn't make life easier for developers to form a mental image of what went wrong in the application. One way to circumvent this is by giving each error (string) a unique error number (like in the BIOS and good old DOS days), and maybe even go as far as stating the file name and/or line number (with the __FILE__, __LINE__ macros maybe ? in debug mode) of the source file the error occurred. Another thing to consider is to define words as ["ERROR: ...", "WARNING: ...", "FAILURE: ...", ...] as to get easy understandable levels of errors in the messages. I hope this is a just as sensible comment as your RFC. Kind regards, Bert Timmerman. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
