Re: [gentoo-dev] et_EE locale and language of error messages

[Jakub Moc]

Kevin F. Quinn wrote:
> On Fri, 19 May 2006 11:38:06 +0200
> Stefan Schweizer <genstef@g.o> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> there are at least two problems with how portage currently handles
>> locales:
>>
>> - Firstly some packages fail to build with obscure LC_* settings
>
> Anything that expects ordering etc from a particular locale, but does
> not set the locale, is broken.  It's nothing to do with obscure; I've
> seen bugs occur due to people setting their default locale to
> en_US.UTF-8 which can hardly be called obscure.  Also calling the
> Estonian locale "obscure" is just rude.
>
>> The continuous stream of et_EE bugs is annoying:
>> http://tinyurl.com/jsqzb
>
> These should be fixed by setting the correct locale prior to the
> commands that are sensitive to it.  Such fixes should be sent or
> negotiated with upstream.
>
>> - and secondly I get my gcc output in german when I have a german
>> locale set. This makes it really hard to report bugs or the
>> bugreports are useless for most developers that do not understand the
>> language.
>
> My preferred  approach here, is that if the people working the bug don't
> understand the report (including wranglers of course) simply resolve it
> "NEEDINFO" requesting the user translate the error messages if
> they can, or perhaps do 'export LC_ALL=C' before emerge and
> repost the results.  Note that setting the locale to C may actually
> cause a change in behaviour, perhaps even preventing the bug from
> occurring if the bug is locale-specific, so obtaining a translation is
> better.

Doing that all the time. Bug reports with errors in any other language
than English are genuine PITA when searching for duplicates. Bugs with
errors in Russian/Estonian/Swedish/Chinese/... (add your favorite
language you can't even say 'good morning' in here) are useless for most
developers out there. Even if you can understand the language, the
translation often sucks, also - you'll get way more references when
googling for some error in English compared to any other locale out there.

Every other user that is asked to provide the messages with locales set
to C comes back asking how do I do it. Then they come back saying, oh
LC_ALL=C, or LC_MESSAGES=C didn't work, where do I put it exactly? Then
they come back and say, oh, it still didn't work... Also, asking someone
to provide errors in English when they occured say 10 hours into OO.org
compile makes the user really happy, of course. :P

Please, make portage spit out the errors in English by *default* to not
waste people's time. If someone insists on overriding it, then let them
do it in make.conf, but the default should be English and English should
be required when filing bugs (unless they are locale-specific ones).

I don't care about the amount of et_EE bugs, however they are almost
always upstream ones and I don't see that Gentoo devs would be keen on
fixing them - of course it's very low priority and there's more
important stuff to do in the limited time devs can spend on Gentoo
stuff, also users can emerge the thing just fine just by unsetting that
locale.

>> One problem could be that packages depend on LC_* to install the
>> correct language. But that is a real bug then in my opinion, because
>> ebuilds should only honour LINGUAS and not LC_* during build time.
>> Those bugs should be detected and fixed.
>
> I disagree.  LINGUAS is a Gentoo-specific thing, so is only relevant to
> ebuilds.  If a package uses LC_* to determine the user's locale
> preferences, I see no problem with that.

Nope, LINGUAS is not Gentoo-specific, it's pretty much standard thing
for anything gettext-based.



-- 
Best regards,

 Jakub Moc
 mailto:jakub@g.o
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