On 01/07/2011 06:44, Owen O'Malley wrote:
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Eric Baldeschwieler
<[email protected]>wrote:
Do other apache projects have a good localization framework for error
messages?
Java has very good localization capabilities. However, it is a huge
pervasive change if we want to get each and every user-facing string
localizable.
-- Owen
Let's be precise: Internationalisation (note the spelling) is a
maintenance mess too. It's not so much a "one off event" as something
you have to do every time anyone adds an error message, or you gradually
let the percentage of i18n'd messages drop over time. Given a limitation
of Hadoop now is that when you get near the fringes of the valid
configuration space the messages aren't that helpful, I'd focus on those.
I say "I" literally here, as it tends to me that hits these problems.
In a concession to the US installed base, I will spell words like
"datacentre" and "normalised" incorrectly for EN_GB. This is not just
politeness, it's self interest: I added a message to Ant about an
unknown task that said "your task is spelt wrong", and we kept on
getting bugreps saying "you have spelled spelled wrong" that I'd close
as "workforme, you can't spell the past tense of spelled correctly",
until I got bored and changed it to a present-tense form that was valid
everywhere.
I18n getting started docs are good, and examples, but error messages may
be best left as is. One possibility though is to add a unique error code
to each one that could be indexed in each document, wiki, etc.
-steve
