Redfish message registries, plus translation

[Brad Bishop]

> On Feb 18, 2020, at 2:25 PM, Bills, Jason M <jason.m.bills at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 2/17/2020 5:53 PM, Joseph Reynolds wrote:
>> On 2/16/20 5:37 PM, Andrew Jeffery wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Sat, 15 Feb 2020, at 06:27, Matt Spinler wrote:
>>>> Hi James,
>>>> 
>>>> It's looking like in our future we will have to provide:
>>>> 
>>>> 1) Redfish logs using multiple message registries that probably can't be
>>>>      hardcoded into hpp files and checked in.
>>>>      - For example, a registry for our host firmware and hypervisor errors,
>>>>        as our BMC handles displaying logs for them, that we would pick up
>>>>        during our build process.
>>>> and
>>>> 
>>>> 2) Message registry text in multiple languages
>>>> 
>>>> Those being my goals, I have a few questions:
>>>> 
>>>> In general, is the multi-language strategy to just provide a standalone
>>>> registry array for each language which the code then selects based on the
>>>> Language property?
>>>> 
>>>> To support both of the above, would you be open to having functionality
>>>> added
>>>> to read in registries from data files, including based on language? Or,
>>>> would you
>>>> have any other ideas for how to support these items?
>>> Bit of a drive-by question, but shouldn't we be using GNU gettext[1] to
>>> handle translation?
>> Matt's proposal is for BMCWeb to have two languages:
>> 1. The implementation language.  When BMCWeb writes internal log entries, these will be in English.  The BMCWeb developers will use these to understand what is going on,  and the BMC admin may be able to read the, but they are not for BMC users.
>> We can certainly use gettext to internationalize this. But it is not what Matt is asking about.
>> 2. The languages used for Redfish messages.  These message are added to the HTTP response body.  These are meant to be read by any BMC REST API user.  For example, messages from the Redfish "Base" message registry Base.1.7.0.json within DSP8011.  BMCWeb has a hard-coded version of a subset of these messages, for example, the AccountModified message in https://github.com/openbmc/bmcweb/blob/master/redfish-core/src/error_messages.cpp These messages are defined in English and meant to be translated. That's what Matt is asking about.
>> Here's my drive-by response.
>> The current implementation is locked into English-only.  BMCWeb code sends messages like this:
>> 1. #include https://github.com/openbmc/bmcweb/blob/master/redfish-core/include/error_messages.hpp 2. Write code like: propertyValueModified(res, "myProperty", myModifiedValue);
>> This calls the function in error_messages.cpp which is hard-coded English.
>> Having hard-coded function calls and hard-coded implementations helps with BMCWeb's goal for performance and startup times.
>> https://github.com/openbmc/bmcweb/blob/master/DEVELOPING.md
>> However, IMHO, the development process to add new Redfish messages to BMCWeb is cumbersome.  It should be as easy as copying Redfish's new JSON file.
> To ease this, there is a script in bmcweb that is designed to parse the JSON message registries into the header file.  

So I’m a total bmcweb noob - but any reason why the runtime can’t just parse the json?  Why does it have to get converted to a header?