error info handling in MIT krb5 code

[Alexandra Ellwood]

On Mar 29, 2006, at 9:49 AM, Sam Hartman wrote:

>>>>>> "Nicolas" == Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> writes:
>
>
>>> I'm concerned about having complex formatting in the error
>>> handling interfaces.  I'm concerned that it may make
>>> translation of strings harder particularly for Apple and
>>> Windows.  I don't know what the solution is here.
>
>     Nicolas> We've run into this problem in Solaris with SASL.
>
>     Nicolas> Solutions include: per-thread LC_MESSAGES settings and
>     Nicolas> message catalog lookup functions extended to accept a
>     Nicolas> locale name.  None are implemented...
>
> No, you've run into the problem that dealing with the locale in a
> multi-client server is hard.
>
> I'm concerned that the native translation mechanism on OS X and
> Windows does not support printf style formatting.


That isn't a problem with Mac OS X.  Here's an example from Tiger  
Kerberos.app's realms editor:

English: "KAppStringAskRemoveServer" = "Are you sure you want to  
delete the server '%@'?";
French:  "KAppStringAskRemoveServer" = "Êtes-vous certain de vouloir  
supprimer le serveur %@ ?";
German:  "KAppStringAskRemoveServer" = "Möchten Sie den Server „%@“  
wirklich löschen?";

Where %@ is an Cocoa-specific printf format character that prints  
Objective-C objects.  The final error string is generated with:

NSString *msg = [NSString stringWithFormat: NSLocalizedString  
(@"KAppStringAskRemoveServer", NULL), serverString];


We could use %s with sprintf and UTF8 strings just as easily.  And  
there's no reason why we couldn't localize the other arguments to  
stringWithFormat: if that was necessary.  Most of my uses were for  
realm names, server names and file paths so I've never needed to do  
that.


--lxs

Alexandra Ellwood <lxs at mit.edu>
MIT Kerberos Development Team
<http://mit.edu/lxs/www>