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Re: gEDA-dev: [RFC] Blog: Error reporting & handling in libgeda
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.
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