Internationalisation of bzr cli

[Martin Pool]

On 30 April 2011 03:01, Martin Ueding <list at martin-ueding.de> wrote:
> English logfiles have the advantage that they can be parsed easier, I
> assume. Writing both languages to the log file would mean a lot of overhead.
>
> Maybe an option would be to write logfiles in English only, but offer a
> tool to localize the logfiles on demand. In case somebody has an error
> with bzr, they can share their "universal" English logfile and everybody
> can translate it into their native language.

We have a distinction (and are trying to make it sharper) between
trace messages for developers and ui messages, including errors and
warnings, for users.  If we keep the former in English and
untranslated (not marked for translation) and translate the latter we
should be ok.  If somebody is trying to dig into an error but they
don't understand the English debug message they can try generic
machine translation or they can just ask for clarification, as Bazaar
developers already do.

In newer code we are trying to raise warnings and errors in a
structured way through the UI object which would give a chance to log
the non-translatable ID of the warning.  Often just the traceback will
give a pretty good clue as to what error occurred even if the message
itself is not in English.

Martin