Re: kernel support for non-english user messages

Jon Portnoy
2003-04-10T22:53:31Z

[CC list trimmed, it was getting ridiculous]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Richard B. Johnson wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>
> > >>>>> " " == Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> writes:
> >
[snip]
>
> When somebody is writing a driver, if they have any experience,
> they write debugging messages in their native language. But, once
> the driver is written, these debugging messages should be removed
> or #defined out. A properly functioning driver should never complain
> about anything. It shouldn't do anything like you see when you
> execute `dmesg`. The only time you should see information is
> if there's trouble. And trouble with software should be fixed
> immediately so you never have to encounter messages because software
> didn't work. So, you are left will hardware messages like your
> SCSI disk didn't come on-line, or you are out of disk-space.
> For so few messages, you don't need translation, certainly not
> in the kernel. Just Babel-fish it and away you go.
>

A whole lot of users use dmesg output to figure out if their kernel is
detecting a piece of hardware. That's a very useful thing to have handy
and definitely not something that should be yanked out for the sake of
making it look pretty for people who don't know what they're doing with
their computer.