[Info-vax] vaxc!errno message text in non-English

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-10-14 16:39:43 +0000, Karl Williamson said:

> This man page 
> http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82final/5763/5763pro_056.html#index_x_1567 
> seems to indicate that strerror() will return the error message text of 
> vaxc!errno when errno itself is EVMSERR, and that the text is based on 
> the POSIX locale.  I've also heard that a language pack needs to be 
> installed in order to get something that isn't English.
> 
> Is all this true?  If not how does it really work?

What you want is not available.

There's language-independent, generic support for adding 
internationalization into C applications as part of the add-on I18N kit 
that's been distributed with VMS for use by C applications.  The I18N 
utilities are discussed here: 
<http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/73final/6494/6494pro.html>

What you're looking for were known as the local-language customizations 
(translations) for OpenVMS and for DECwindows, those kits were regional 
or local and all were verty version-specific kits, and those are now 
all long gone from maintenance or even availability.

I'm not entirely certain that support for the internationalization of 
the help files ever really fully worked, as I recall there were bugs 
involving those when the language was altered; the HELP /MESSAGE 
commands could tip over.  Whether that was all fixed or was marked as 
unsupported, I don't know.  Back when last I did know these details 
officially 
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/n6SVDXClJbM/fnFKnejO7GwJ?>, 
there were work-arounds.

There was also some general documentation on customizing and APIs 
involved in the local-language variants, but I don't recall it being 
incorporated into the main OpenVMS documentation.

Related: <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/811> 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/1637>

> Are UTF-8 locales supported?

Nope.  Beyond filenames, OpenVMS has only negligible support for UTF-8, 
and none of the mainline OpenVMS tools and utilities offer any support 
past DEC MCS, if even that much.  DEC MCS is close to and a forerunner 
of ISO Latin 1, but beyond <http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/403> 
<http://labs.hoffmanlabs.com/node/650> there's basically nothing.

Please check with the HP support folks directly for the official 
answers, of course.


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