Re: @dircategory (Re: Translating Emacs manuals is of strategic importance)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2024 19:03:33 +0000
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>,
>       Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>,
>       emacs-devel@gnu.org, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>,
>       help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> It's up to people writing the Texinfo manuals what they put for
> @dircategory.  In practice it seems that there aren't any well-followed
> conventions for this so top-level dir files end up quite disorganised.
> 
> There are no conventions that I know of for the @dircategory of translated
> manuals.

I always thought that utils/dir-example is the de-facto standard of
the categories which are "blessed" by the Texinfo project.

In this thread, we are raising the issue of some kind of
standardization of the categories for translated manuals.  If you are
saying that you don't think there should be such standardization, then
I guess we in the Emacs project will come up with our own solutions,
and the rest of the GNU Project will have to cope with that, since the
categories we use gets copied to the system-wide DIR files when Emacs
is installed.

> If desired, users could have a directory containing solely Info manuals
> in a certain language along with a dir file containing their dir entries.

That would mean INFOPATH will have to be amended to include such
directories.  It also means that INFOPATH will eventually include a
lot of directories, and search for Info manuals might become
significantly slower.  I'm not sure this is a scalable arrangement.

> I will read through other messages in this thread and see if I have anything
> to add.

Thanks.