In the old days ... (was:Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Workspace commands and automate/stdio)

[hendrik]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 07:00:52AM +0200, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> 
> The problem with gettext, IMHO and in my experience, is that your are
> never "really sure" it will work, i.e. actually output translated
> strings... e.g. test builds in a directory certainly can't find the
> necessary files, or at most find the .mo files of the previous
> system-available release.
> It's something which works "almost always" and this is not a problem,
> because usually works for the final user (the package or port
> maintainers take care of that!) and even the end user doesn't usually
> scream or panic if the program is shown in the (default) english...
> while it would definitely do panic if default strings were
> machine-oriented ;-)

This discussion reminds me of the messages in OD/360 many many years 
ago, where each message was prefixed with a message number, such as 
IEH245I.  THis made it easy to look up in a manual to find the 
explanation, in case the human-readable message text wasn't enough.  I 
guess nowadays one could use it as a search key in google.

The one that amused me was

IEH999I

which means "INVALID MESSAGE NUMBER".  Unfortunately, that one did not 
include the actual invalid number in the message.

-- hendrik