[Libvir] RFC: Add a short doc with libvirt coding style guidelines

[Jim Meyering]

"Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> There's a few coding style guidelines we've kind of informally agreed upon
>> wrt to libvirt patches, and perhaps more that we ought to make decisions on.
>> For the benefit of people sending patches I reckon its worth writing these
>> down. So I'm attaching a proposed doc 'HACKING' in which we can detail the
>> guidelines.  And yes, we don't uniformly comply with these guidelines in
>> all places....all the more reason to list them & fix cases where we don't
>> comply :-)
>
>   5. Ensure any user visible strings are marked for translation
>
>       eg wrap all strings with _(...)
>
>         virXendError(xend, VIR_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR,
>                      _("domain information incomplete, missing domid"));
>
> Translating error messages is a bad idea: (1) Naive users ignore error
> messages anyway. (2) It makes the error message much less useful when
> doing an internet search for solutions. (3) If an error message is
> posted to this list, it's much less useful if it isn't in English.

Hi Rich,

I've always heard that support for translatable diagnostics
is an important feature.

While I'm no UI/internationalization expert, I would have thought that
less-savvy users would need the messages more than others.

If a user is taking the time to report a bug to an English-speaking list
and to include a precise diagnostic, they're probably clueful enough to
translate any such message for us.  At worst, since we have the .po
files, we can look up the translation manually -- or just use an online
translator.