New ARI warning Sat Aug 14 01:53:52 UTC 2010

[André Pönitz]

On Monday 16 August 2010 16:45:26 ext Joel Brobecker wrote:
> > Of above warnings, only first appears to be added by a recent patch of mine,
> > while others were there all the time. That said, have we ever decided if MI
> > should try to i18n its error messages? At least some of messages, like
> > "Unable to read memory" above, can probably be shown to user -- except it's
> > so generic as to be useless. Some messages, clearly, indicate frontend
> > bugs and showing them to users, or l10n-ing, makes no sense.
> 
> For error messages, ISTM that the intent would have to have the error
> message displayed verbatim by the IDE, no? In that case, it would be
> better if it was translated than not.  Otherwise, we place the burden
> of providing translations on the IDE, which I think is a bad idea.

As someone working on a frontend for (among others) gdb I pretty 
much prefer a debugger creating non-translated messages as in my
case there are way more cases where an error message is not shown
to the user but rather triggers workarounds or other "invisible"
behaviour.

Also, in the rare cases where the error message are passed to the
user they are usually "enriched" by explaining them or by providing
additional context.

In either case the actual message is treated closer to something like
an "error id", not as a string ready for human consumption.

Maybe a solution would be to provide the translated message in
addition to a (preferably longterm unchanged) "error id" string?

Andre'