Make error messages more useful: add a URI

[Benjamin Kaduk]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2014, Roland Mainz wrote:

>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Benjamin Kaduk" <kaduk at mit.edu>
> > To: "Roland Mainz" <rmainz at redhat.com>
> > Cc: "Nico Williams" <nico at cryptonector.com>, krbdev at mit.edu
> > Sent: Monday, October 6, 2014 5:59:22 PM
> > Subject: Re: Make error messages more useful: add a URI
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > > From: "Nico Williams" <nico at cryptonector.com>
> > > > To: "Greg Hudson" <ghudson at mit.edu>
> > > > Cc: krbdev at mit.edu
> > > > Sent: Thursday, October 2, 2014 11:15:08 PM
> > > > Subject: Re: Make error messages more useful: add a URI
> >
> > > 2. How can we carry over the value of LC_MESSAGES (or better: The result of
> > > LANG/LC_MESSAGES/LC_ALL, e.g. $ printf '%s\n'
> > > "${LC_ALL:-${LC_MESSAGES:-${LANG:-"C"}}}" # in a POSIX shell) ?
> >
> > I suspect this is hard to do in a concise manner, so may not end up
> > getting done.
>
> 1. Why ? AFAIK this isn't hard (see example below)
> 2. This is then going to backfire in very BAD ways for some scenarios - there are governments like (PRC, Japan, etc.) which mandate correct localisation support. No localisation support - no sales to government.
>
> One option might be to include the result of $ printf '%s\n' "${LC_ALL:-${LC_MESSAGES:-${LANG:-"C"}}}" # (minus encoding, e.g. "en_US.UTF-8" and
> "en_US.ISO8859-1" can be reduced to "en_US") into the URL, e.g. file:///usr/share/krb5/docs/en_US/krb_message_8291.html

The serious difficulties only apply to an extra piece of text inserted as
a literal value in krb5.conf.  This text is administrator-supplied, and
cannot be a part of or message catalog because it is not known at compile
time.  On the other hand, an administrator can choose to not put any
additional text requiring localization (e.g., retaining the original
error string and adding only a URL with no other text), in which case
there is no problem.

-Ben