Open Stack

Doug,

I had a conversation with someone from the i18n team in Atlanta at the PTG,
and later with a couple of operators (from a non-english speaking country).
I was surprised to hear that both the operators were in favor of doing away
with log message translation. Thinking about it some more, I believe that
the rationale may come from the fact that in years past (long ago, when
people had tape drives and green screens) people actually read messages and
then tried to understand what they did to figure out what the corrective
action needed to be. And the messages needed to be sufficiently informative
to direct people to the possible remedial actions.

Today the workflow is to copy the message and plonk it into google and let
search do its thing.

Given this, log message translation fragments the solution space because
nothing out there consolidates the reports of problems with error messages
and converts the non-english messages back to some common language for
search.

I'm not an operator, but I'd love to hear from operators whether this
workflow is in fact the one we should be planning for because it has
implications that go beyond translation. First, should we make messages
uniquely searchable, such that a search result set uniquely relates to a
specific problem. Conversely, if we go the route of message translation in
the future should all messages include some searchable code (like Microsoft
does with their crash codes).

Thanks,

-amrith 

--
Amrith Kumar
amrith.kumar at gmail.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Hellmann [mailto:doug at doughellmann.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2017 9:39 AM
To: openstack-operators <openstack-operators at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: [Openstack-operators] need input on log translations

There is a discussion on the -dev mailing list about the i18n team decision
to stop translating log messages [1]. The policy change means that we may be
able to clean up quite a lot of "clutter" throughout the service code,
because without anyone actually translating the messages there is no need
for the markup code used to tag those strings.

If we do remove the markup from log messages, we will be effectively
removing "multilingual logs" as a feature. Given the amount of work and code
churn involved in the first roll out, I would not expect us to restore that
feature later.

Therefore, before we take what would almost certainly be an irreversible
action, we would like some input about whether log message translations are
useful to anyone. Please let us know if you or your customers use them.

Thanks,
Doug

[1]
http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2017-March/113365.html

_______________________________________________
OpenStack-operators mailing list
OpenStack-operators at lists.openstack.org
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-operators