"reports" tidy-up?

[David Lee]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Julian Field wrote:

> David Lee wrote:
> > Julian:  An observation and suggestion for background 'idle process'
> > tidying as you continue to recover.
> >
> > The various "reports" files have a variety of different types of
> > signature.  I suspect that these differences are the result of 'creep'
> > rather than design.
> >
> > Amongst the variety:
> >
> > [...]
> > (And that's just a quick scan through just the English-language ones.)
> >
> > Could you consider not only rationalising all these, but also making
> > eveything fully substitutable?
> >
> > For instance:
> > 1. "Postmaster", "MailScanner" might use the "Local Postmaster" setting
> >    from 'MailScanner.conf' (many sites might want a properly specified
> >    email address there);
> > 2. "Email Virus Scanner" probably either shouldn't be there, or should
> >    have a consistent "%MS-product%" substitutable setting.
> > 3. "For all your IT ..." should be consistently present, but in
> >    substitutable form, such as "%MS-advert%".
> >
> > (And then, of course, someone might further suggest variation by
> > rulesets...)
> >
> > Just a thought for background pondering and (I hope) improvement.
>
> All good ideas, but *damn* tedious to fix in all languages :-(

If you could come up with a design, or structure, or framework, for
abstracting the strings into new "%postmaster% (etc.) variables (and
perhaps ruleset hooks), then you could pass the buck back to us, the MS
site-admins, to help with the actual files and their strings in the
various languages.

Bear in mind that those particular post-signature items seem to be mostly
still in English anyway, so the first release could simply leave them in
place as-is, with no reduction in current functionality.

So the initial step would, I think, be solely structural with no actual
language work needed.  I would be happy to beta-test (including a trial
French translation (Geordie, too, should you one day decide to support
dialects) to demonstrate that the structure is working).


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