Re: environment variable for English version of error message

[Keld Jørn Simonsen <keld at dkuug dot dk>]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 03:44:50PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:
> > We were discussing error messages and bug reporting on the debian-i18n
> > lists because some people were doing bug reports in their native
> > language instead of English.
> 
> You can tell the user to set the environment variable LC_ALL to C before
> running the program. Example:
>   $ env LC_ALL=C gnu-foobar

Yes, of cause, but that is not the common thing for a normal user to do,
before running every program. The normal scenario is that the user wants
to run the program in the locale and thus language that s/he prefers.
Then an error may occur, and then the user wants to know morei, to avoid
it next time, or to complete the task at hand, or report the error. 
For these purposes it would be handy to have the English message
available, as a post mortem thing.

And it is often not possible to reproduce an error - or cumbersome or
not practical to reproduce it. A user may not understand English - or
understand English well enough to rproduce the error.

One way to do it could be to save parameters to gettext every time
gettext was called, and then on error exit do a format of the string in
English, and save it in an environment variable.

Best regards
Keld