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

[Gavin Smith]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2024 at 09:24:14PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 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.

It was "categories of the Free Software Directory" but that no longer
follows the same structure as it did when that recommendation
was first made.

The Texinfo manual under @dircategory lists a few example categories
which could be used (fairly consistent with what is in util/dir-example)
but at this point it is up to document authors to decide what categories
to use.  They could look at what other documents do or invent their own
categories if none are appropriate.

> 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.

As I said, my personal preference is that categories should be translated,
although it is the decision of the translator in conjunction with the
user community of that language.

> > 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.

There's a limit to how many languages one person can read, so they won't
need dozens of such directories.