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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2024 21:17:35 +0000
> Cc: jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org, stefankangas@gmail.com,
>       vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org,
>       help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> On Sat, Jan 06, 2024 at 10:41:11PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > There's a limit to how many languages one person can read, so they won't
> > > need dozens of such directories.
> > 
> > I was thinking about automatic computation of Info-directory-list, the
> > way we have in Emacs now.  That might need to account for directories
> > that _might_ exist, but aren't necessarily there on every system.  The
> > potential list of language-specific subdirectories _is_ long.
> > 
> > Having all of the manuals in a single directory with language-specific
> > suffixes completely avoids these problems, and will work with the
> > current standard Info directory trees without any changes.
> 
> If using language suffixes for Info manuals becomes common practice,
> in the future we could add support to the standalone Info program to
> look for such manuals when following cross-references, dependent on
> users' settings.
> 
> I'm not insisting that the language suffixes shouldn't be used in
> preference to language-specific installation directories, if that's
> more convenient or practical, even if the latter way seems to have
> some possible advantages.

I think it would be good if the GNU Project as a whole decided that
translated manuals should be called with language suffixes, as that
will allow cross-manual links to work across the project.  By
contrast, using special directories needs more tweaking.  Moreover,
even if eventually the decision will be to use language-specific
directories, I suggest that manuals in those directories will still be
named with language suffixes, so that the user who has both the
English and translated manuals could request the one they want
explicitly.