Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcso!hpfcdc!rer
From: rer@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Rob Robason)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: cp gives poor error message (so what else is new?)
Message-ID: <5570339@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Date: 30 Nov 89 16:38:16 GMT
References: <210038@speclab.bgp-usgs.gov>
Organization: HP Ft. Collins, Co.
Lines: 30

> Could someone in the Unix standards area see if cp could be changed
> to give reasonable error messages.  How about the rest of Unix?

Roger,

The problem seems to be that UN*X has been around long enough that
people EXPECT it to misbehave in this way and have all kinds of brain
dead scripts written which assume the cryptic message.  Attempts to fix
these at HP have often led to complaints.  One I remember someone here
fixing was "Don't grok 'something-or-other'":  I was pleased to see it
changed to english, but there were those UN*X bigots who thought it
blasphemous.

The real risk is that some officially sanctioned validation suite
(NIST's for example 1/2 :-) will test the messages and fail for non
conformance!  Then our ability to claim standards conformance would be
shot down.

We've been discussing in an internal notes discussion the pros and cons
of changing the perror() messages and have stumbled on the same issue.
One possible solution is to use X/OPEN NLS (Internationalization, I18N
for short) and provide american language messages for those who choose
LANG=american, while the bigots can stick with the default C language.

Rather than have everyone do this N times, hopefully OSF will provide a
set of NLS commands (and perhaps even distribute contributed message
catalogues for various languages) so everyone can get uniform, clear
messages.

Rob Robason