On Mar 15, 2012, at 4:23 PM, William A. Rowe Jr. wrote:
> On 3/15/2012 3:16 PM, Eric Covener wrote:
>> I'd just as well add supplementary info to a wiki for the specific
>> message IDs that require extra discussion. I've never been a fan of
>> the massive "messages" publication that's 98% the verbatim error text
>> phrased three different ways.
>
> I'm actually hoping to start that RSN, as in the next two weeks.
>
> I believe we are at the point where we can introduce a degree of
> localization of our error output for non-English-speaking admins,
> without breaking ABI in 2.4.
>
> So we would have per-language files for translation (i thought about
> combining them, but the modulo in character sets makes this really
> sort of unworkable, I know the language snippets in the custom
> error document structure can be difficult to maintain). Our new
> error id assignments provide the lookup key. Missing error text
> would receive today's English treatment.
>
> But I can't see an error guide which says;
>
> AP0000 Error resolving host name, did you forget 'ServerName'?
>
> This Error indicates httpd could not resolve a host name from dns
> for the configured server ip address. The ServerName directive
> can be used to work around this dns lookup issue.
>
> Add words, but to what benefit? The lookup/list, though would be
> great if the user quickly wants to find out what AP0000 is in their
> own native language, even though the AP0000 message in the bug
> report or blog entry was printed in an unfamiliar language.
Yes. Ideally we're talking about only a small percentage of the error messages being represented
in this documentation.
Although there are 2000+ error codes at the moment, I would hope that we'd have far less than
that actually represented in the docs.
Most of our error messages are self-explanatory. The advantages of doing this at all are:
1) Additional help on error conditions that might have several different possible solutions.
Viz: http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/13PermissionDenied
2) Localization
3) Searches for error code AP0000 resolves to the docs, or a mirror thereof, rather than resulting
in a hit on the svn server.
--
Rich Bowen
rbowen@rcbowen.com :: @rbowen
rbowen@apache.org
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