On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Simon Richter wrote:
> > However, the are exceptions to this behaviour.
> > Potentially, all programs with i18n (and/or l12n) support can log
> > messages with a different code set. They are many.
>
> Hmm, I'm not sure explicit support (i.e. conversion etc) is really
> necessary. Programs log in English not because the programmers are lazy
> but because unified log messages help a lot in bug reports. Only some
> local software may be logging in a different language, and the codepage
> should be set up correctly for that.
English is a widespread and frank language. Anyway your 'unified log
message' argumentation don't work with bug reports.
In bug reports it's important to describe incorrect software behaviours;
and the bugs described should be reproducible.
It's not essential unify log messages; it's essential for sysadmins to
understand the log message semantics.
Not only. From a computer and network security point of view, what has
been logged is not always reliable. The host/logger/log repository can be
compromised. So not always is possible trust log messages to make a bug
report.
Programs log in English because there is no particular reason to say
simple things like: "Null connection from...", "failed login from...",
"can't open...", "Server listening on port..." in languages less
widespread than english.
But this not means that a 7 bit ASCII encoding is preferable.
Infact simple messages can be logged with characters part of
ISO 8859-X standard (or others). As pointed out by Petter Reinholdtsen
with is sendmail example.
ciao
alfonso
--
Alfonso De Gregorio, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
