RE: more verbose error reporting

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

> "Kurt D. Zeilenga" wrote:
> >
> > At 01:34 AM 8/4/99 -0700, Howard Chu wrote:
> > >I would like to see more diagnostic information sent back to
> the client when
> > >things fail. The protocol allows arbitrary error message text
> to accompany
> > >each result, but slapd code rarely uses this feature. Why is that?
> >
> > Time and energy.  There is much room for improvement here.
>
> Also language problems. Does an error string in hindi make
> much sense to a german user ?
>
That's a good point, but I think something is better than nothing.
If this were pure X.500 I would totally agree with you. But this is LDAP,
where attribute and objectclass names are already just English strings - I
think on the whole people who mention I18N in this space are just doing lip
service. In this particular case, given that attribute & objectclass names
are in English, I don't see anything wrong with reporting schema violation
errors in English. Even if the rest of the message is unintelligible, it
will still be enough to pinpoint the problem.

I understand that time and energy are scarce; that is a perfectly valid
reason. But saying "it will be a problem to internationalize error messages"
is not a good enough reason not to have any messages at all.