Make available to translate message strings into "Messages" tab.

[Simek]

Idea: Make available to translate message strings into "Messages" tab.

[Nicolas]

Addon programs currently have no way to see what's going on with the client, other than parsing the existing English messages. Both translating messages and changing them (to make them more clear; lots have been changed a few months ago) cause problems with that kind of parsing.

However I strongly agree that we need to have those messages translated. So I suggest having a separate computer-readable log (maybe XML?). That way addons will get a log even better than they have now, and we can change the existing messages to be more user-friendly, translated to different languages, etc. without causing technical problems. This separate log should be available using a separate GUI RPC. Maybe it shouldn't go to a file.

Another way is only generating XML logs, and having the Manager convert this to human-readable text of the selected language. This would allow the user to change the language "on the fly" and have this affect all previously-logged messages instead of only messages that appear after the language change. Also helpful to send a piece of log to somebody on the help support, user can change language to English, paste the log on Skype window, change it back to his preferred language.

[anonymous]

If someone goes to one of the forums and pastes in the equivalent of stdoutdae.txt, will it be understandable to those trying to help them?

[Nicolas]

Replying to anonymous:

If someone goes to one of the forums and pastes in the equivalent of stdoutdae.txt, will it be understandable to those trying to help them?

Since the computer-readable and language-neutral log should be saved to disk, there could be a way to either show past logs in different languages (so the user would choose English and use that on the forum), or to let users post that computer-readable log in a forum post and have the forum software convert it to human-readable English automatically.

Just my two cents... Will we see any of this in 6.0? As it would bring a bit of incompatibility, a major version number change seems like the right moment to implement it.

[davea]

The core client writes messages using printf()s throughout the code. I don't know how to make these translatable. If anyone does, please let me know.

[Nicolas]

Like I said before, change it to print in a language-neutral machine-readable format, and have the manager convert to user-friendly text. That way you can even change language at any moment and have the whole contents of the Messages tab (not just new messages) get updated. This also gives a lot more power to addon authors.

If you use this solution, don't rush on it; the format needs proper planning.

[davea]

Messages printed by the core client running by itself also need to be comprehensible

[Nicolas]

Agreed: Messages outputted in whatever way by the core client (stdout, log, or GUI RPC) should be comprehensible. But comprehensible for normal users, blind users using either braille devices or screenreaders, alternative GUIs... Users would like messages in their native languages. Addons need messages that are easy to parse using code. And imagine a screenreader pronouncing "Starting task ltm-r48_h40_u05_p998_lai8_control-744_0 using ltm-acasa-cli version 100".

Let the other end of the GUI RPC connection talk to the user. Generating user-friendly logs from the core client breaks the user interface - core client separation.

[Nicolas]

The core client could have a basic "user interface" (print logs in English to stdout), and keep the current message RPC doing the same for backwards compatibility. And still have a new GUI RPC giving the machine-readable messages. For that to work, it should generate the logging in that machine-readable format first, and then convert to the English text.

[Didactylos]

See also #247 for a suggestion about colour coding messages. Since that idea is dependent on this task, I'm closing #247 as a duplicate and referencing it here.

[Nicolas]

tagged

[Nicolas]

Let's be realistic: this won't be even considered until BOINC 7.0...