Re: htmlxref.cnf vs. manual names with a dot

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Gavin,

Gavin Smith <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Mon, May 06, 2019 at 12:18:21PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> In fact—but that’s another story—I’d like to suggest improvements so
>> that the Info readers automatically open ‘dir.LANG’, when available,
>> instead of just ‘dir’, where LANG is extracted from the current locale.
>
> Manual translations may be substandard or out-of-date, so this is 
> something that users should opt into, I think.  I believe it is already 
> possible to access translations of manuals by changing INFOPATH, and no 
> alteration of the info browser is needed.  For example a French version
> of a manual could be installed under /usr/share/info/fr/guix.info and 
> the English version as /usr/share/info/guix.info.  The user can set 
> INFOPATH to /usr/share/info/fr:/usr/share/info to say they want the 
> French version when possible.

I don’t find this option entirely satisfactory because that makes it
harder to find about translations, and that in turn would make it more
likely that they become substandard—a vicious circle.

For example in Guix we have that sentence that cross-references
translated manuals so that users know about them and can follow the link
if they want.  We can also tell them to type “info guix.es” or whatever,
which is always simpler than explaining about INFOPATH, etc.

As for being out-of-date: we use PO4A for translation, which is roughly
a wrapper around gettext, such that untranslated sentences are kept in
English.  So there’s no particular concern here.

Overall I think we should make it easier to access documentation in
one’s native language.  It would seem natural to take the current locale
into account for that, somehow.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Ludo’.