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

[Craig A. Berry]

In article <l3h8tt$kuj$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Stephen Hoffman <seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> wrote:

> 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 think the CRTL docs for strerror are a little confusing in that I 
think the text of the string is only based on locale for the first, 
standards-compliant argument to strerror, but not for the second, 
VMS-specific argument.

> > 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>

I didn't realize the language-specific features were both incomplete 
and abandoned.  For some reason I imagined that many denizens of this 
newsgroup were typing on their national LK-variant keyboards and 
reading "your hovercraft is full of eels" and other important system 
messages translated into Swedish, Japanese, etc.

> > 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.

This seems, sadly, the correct answer for "the mainline OpenVMS tools 
and 
utilities," but not for the usual sense of locale, which more typically 
means the POSIXish APIs, data files, and utilities referred to above as 
coming with the I18N kits.  At one time I think these were shared with 
or at least ported from Tru64 and thus, for C programs, provided a 
comparable capability to what was available on commercial unixen 10 or 
12 years ago.  They may not be very up-to-date, but it looks like they 
are still available and supported under VMS v8.4:

<http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/84final/ba322_90087/apg.html>