Open Stack

A good idea to separate into two parts, however I fear that the current 
English strings don't serve the first role as well as first appears. 
This has to do with the pre-processing we do on error strings to make 
more accurate searches and error report titles.

A quick, very artificial example:

"Unable to get service info: Malformed request url"

As English speakers, we can look at this and see that "Unable to get 
service info" is what happened, and "Malformed request url" is why.

So, knowing that there are probably many possible reasons for 'why' we 
were "Unable to get service info", we might chop this part out of our 
search term, or when we ask for help - and indeed you can see an example 
of this in a title here: 
https://answers.launchpad.net/horizon/+question/190188

In other languages sometimes the sentence order is much different. For 
example, in Chinese, that error could be written something like:

因为错误格式的请求URL所以无法获得服务信息

As a Chinese speaker, you know what this says and you can work out the 
'why' and the 'what' in your search term.

As a non-Chinese speaker, you're stuck putting the whole thing into your 
search engine and hoping that no-one chopped off or changed the 
structural elements of the sentence such as 因为 and 所以.

So, perhaps the part that can be used for searches and bug reports 
really does need to be 'locale-independent'. Complex system of 
impossible to understand error numbers, anyone? ;)


Regards,


Tom

On 04/12/2012 11:46 PM, David Kranz wrote:
> Both points of view being expressed about this with respect to log error
> messages are valid and need to be accommodated.
> An answer, as was suggested a while back, is for error messages to have
> two parts:
>
> 1. A locale-independent part that can be used for searches or understood
> by developers who get logs as parts of bug reports.
> 2. A localized part that lets operators determine if the problem is
> their issue or an OpenStack bug to be reported.
>
> The current English string would serve the first role, and the logging
> code could be changed to also emit the localized string if available. I
> would argue
> for this only in the case of ERROR messages and not DEBUG.
>
> While on the subject of logs, it would be good to agree on what actions
> should cause errors in logs to appear. Ideally, they would only occur if
> an OpenStack bug
> was detected (out-of-bounds array ref, etc.) or some operational problem
> occurred (disk ran out of space, etc.). Right now errors are sometimes
> output for other
> reasons such as bad arguments to api calls. This makes it difficult for
> an operator to know when a real problem with the system has occurred.
>
> David Kranz
> Quanta Research Cambridge
>
>
>
>
> On 4/12/2012 9:06 AM, Sheng Bo Hou wrote:
>> Dear OpenStack friends,
>>
>> It will be happy and great for our OpenStack community to see this
>> open project open to more market all over the world.
>> In China, OpenStack community is very active. I heard many Chinese
>> engineers talking about their wish to have a Chinese versioned
>> openStack, including documentation's, manuals, user interfaces, error
>> messages, etc in OpenStack meet-ups.
>> I have many European friends and also Danish friends, since I used to
>> do my university there. They all spoke perfect English, which made me
>> admire, cos they were linguists in my point of view. Oriental
>> languages are different. They are "too far" from the western lingual
>> system. In China, there are many talented engineers, who are not that
>> kind of "linguists", but they are lover of open source. I think it is
>> amazing to open the "door" to them. In China, it is very appreciated
>> for software to be localized as much as possible.
>> I used to google or baidu(a famous Chinese search engine) error
>> messages and logs in Chinese for other software, though it is not
>> Apache. I found a lot of useful references in Chinese, because it has
>> been localized. If it is not localized well first, of course it does
>> not have the google or yahoo ability to search.:-)
>> So far I am rather grateful for all the messages following this i18
>> issue. Thank you so much.
>>
>> Best wishes.
>> Vincent Hou (侯胜博)
>>
>> Software Engineer, Standards Growth Team, Emerging Technology
>> Institute, IBM China Software Development Lab
>>
>> Tel: 86-10-82450778 Fax: 86-10-82453660
>> Notes ID: Sheng Bo Hou/China/IBM at IBMCN E-mail: sbhou at cn.ibm.com
>> Address:3F Ring, Building 28 Zhongguancun Software Park, 8 Dongbeiwang
>> West Road, Haidian District, Beijing, P.R.C.100193
>>
>>
>> *Soren Hansen <soren at linux2go.dk>*
>> Sent by: openstack-bounces+sbhou=cn.ibm.com at lists.launchpad.net
>>
>> 2012-04-12 19:50
>>
>> 	
>> To
>> 	Hua ZZ Zhang/China/IBM at IBMCN
>> cc
>> 	openstack at lists.launchpad.net, Thierry Carrez
>> <thierry at openstack.org>,
>> openstack-bounces+zhuadl=cn.ibm.com at lists.launchpad.net
>> Subject
>> 	Re: [Openstack] I18n issue for OpenStack
>>
>>
>>
>> 	
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Don't get me wrong.. I'd be happy to have the various openstack
>> clients offer localised error messages. I'd also encourage a
>> centralised effort to collect these translationns (so that all the
>> various language bindings will use the same localised error messages).
>>
>> On the server, though, I believe we should stick to English and
>> perhaps have every error message include a link (e.g.
>> http://docs.openstack.doc/exception/NoNetworksDefinedException) to a
>> localised docs site. I think losing the ability to search the web for
>> error messages would be a major loss.
>>
>> --
>> Soren Hansen | http://linux2go.dk/
>> Senior Software Engineer | http://www.cisco.com/
>> Ubuntu Developer | http://www.ubuntu.com/
>> OpenStack Developer | http://www.openstack.org/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
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>
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