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

[Daniel Cerqueira]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2024 21:52:23 +0100
>> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>,
>>      Vincent Belaïche <vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr>,
>>      emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org, help-texinfo@gnu.org
>> 
>> In any case, if a target manual is not yet translated, to me it is the
>> responsibility of the translator of amnual linking to it to either link
>> to the english manual, or to translate the node name in @ref even though
>> it won't lead to an existing manual and the name may need to be changed
>> later on to match with the actual name used in the translated manual.
>> To me both case could make sense depending on many criteria, such as
>> whether readers are likely to read english, whether manuals are
>> being translated...
>
> The translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual exists
> when the translation is being written.  And even if a translated
> manual does exist, there's no reason to be sure it will be installed
> on the end-user's system.
>
> So it would be good to have some Texinfo feature that would make the
> behavior of Info readers more user-friendly in these cases.  Right
> now, the Texinfo features that can help are @documentlanguage and the
> suggestion by Gavin to have in the translated manual an @anchor for
> each @node with the original English name of that @node.
>
How come the translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual
exists?

That is ridiculous.

It is the same as saying that a translator just translated a whole
manual, without checking, and it was already translated. Ludacris.

>> In any case, I don't see any reason to do any automatic redirection in
>> the Info reader, it should remain simple and be the translators/writers
>> responsibilities.
>
> I don't think I agree, because leaving this completely to the
> responsibilities of the translator could easily produce sub-optimal
> results.

Sub-optimal? Like translators are deficient? We, translators, know what
we are doing. (I am the translator of GnuPG and Git).

>> Another reason is that it would not be possible to do the same in
>> HTML, as in HTML it is not possible to check if the target exists.
>
> Even if this cannot possibly be done in HTML (and I'm not yet sure),
> it shouldn't stop us from doing that in Info.  After all, HTML output
> lacks several features of Info output already, and it doesn't stop us.

I wholeheartedly disagree with Eli. In here I am nobody, but still I
don't like this complexity being added to a tool that I use to make
my books (texinfo).