Re: [help-texinfo] Re: Setting human languag for makeinfo

[Karl Berry]

Hi Torsten,

I'm excited you're actually making progress on this knotty problem :).

    we now know how unreliable it seems to be.  

For Texinfo's purposes, we can simply document the combinations that
work.  (Except nothing is working for me, but hopefully that's fixable :)

    Well, it's misusing setlocale() after all.

I'm not sure I buy "misuse".  What alternative is there?  It would be
crazy to reimplement gettext.  We need exactly what gettext already
does.

Anyway, here is the message from Bruno that I was thinking of, with his
locale-switching function -- basically takes care of a bunch of other
envvars, too:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2003-12/msg00023.html

It occurs to me now that getdoctext or gettextdoc or docgettext might be
a clearer name than doclang_.  Or maybe simply _doc.  Hmm.

My other comment is that I think @documentlanguage actually should
support LL_CC as well as just LL, so that if someone wants to write a
Texinfo document in Austrian German, they can.  I don't think that's
hard -- just check if the arg contains an _ and if so, use it verbatim.
And split it up so that language_code is set only to the LL part, I
guess; I don't know the dialect specification rules for HTML, which is
where language_code gets used, as I recall.

Oh, and I wonder if it would be better to add the new information to
language_table in lang.c, instead of creating still another big table ...
(Not sure.)

Thanks!

karl