Re: Where to contribute manual translations ?

[Stefan Kangas]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>
>> CC: "emacs-devel@gnu.org" <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 11:41:20 +0000
>>
>> Thank you for your quick and very complete reply. Yes, I think that the best 
>> would be for me to have
>> this translation under the Emacs project, as it would be kept consistent 
>> with the source code. Is
>> doc/fr/misc/ses.texi OK for the French version path, as the original is 
>> doc/misc/ses.texi ?
>
> SGTM, but I'd like to hear from Stefan Kangas (CC'ed) as well, before
> we make the final decision, as this seems to create a precedent.
>
> Stefan, do you think doc/LANG, where LANG is a language name, is okay
> for keeping translations of manuals to language LANG?

I'd probably prefer to keep them in a subdirectory like

    doc/translations/<...>

My main concern with adding new files [with similar names] is ease of
autocompleting, both inside the doc/ directory, and when using
`project-find-file' together with flexible matching styles.

For the latter case especially, I find that having duplicate file names
under version control often causes conflicts.  Thus, I'd rather we avoid
that if possible.

I'd suggest something like

    doc/translations/$SECTION/$LANG-$MANUAL.texi

so that we end up with

    doc/translations/misc/fr-ses.texi

.

I also considered something like

    doc/translations/$LANG/$SECTION/$MANUAL

so that in this case we end up with

    doc/translations/fr/misc/ses.texi

but that has the same problem that we end up with duplicate file names.
It's also perhaps somewhat overblown given that we only expect to have a
very small number of translated manuals for the foreseeable future.[1]

WDYT?

> Another question is what would be the file name of the corresponding
> Info file, and in what directory should it be generated by makeinfo?

I'm less concerned with autocompleting in this directory, and it's not
under version control.  So it should be easier to change the structure
later, I think.

Perhaps for now something like

    info/$LANG/$MANUAL

is okay?

We could then add the language-specific directory to
`Info-directory-list' based on the users locale, or something along
those lines.

For the sake of completion, I'll mention that we might at some point
want to consider publishing the translated manual on our web pagess.

Footnotes:
[1]  I'm not aware of anyone else working on translating our manuals.