On 2026-02-10 19:23:01 +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 10:17:21AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 04:00:17AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > > On 2026-02-06 17:32:16 +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > > > > The next pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release (7.3) has > > > > been > > > > uploaded to > > > > > > > > https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.2.91.tar.xz > > > > > > I've tested the Debian/experimental package. > > > > > > > * Language > > > [...] > > > > . if there is no @documentlanguage, the language is unspecified, > > > > rather > > > > than en_US. (texi2any will still use English strings by default, > > > > but will not put en_US in the output, depending on output format.) > > > > > > This is problematic, because until now, the default language was > > > the English one. So this will break current manuals that do not > > > use @documentlanguage (because it was useless). > > > > This is a feature, now no @documentlanguage means that the language is > > unspecified. As a side note, previously, the language was already > > unspecified for some output formats, see > > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2025-03/msg00076.html > > > > If an author intends to be explicit about the language, the manual > > should be modified. > > Yes, as Patrice explains the current behaviour is a deliberate choice. > (It's wrong to term it a "regression".)
The fact is that until now, lang="en" was generated by default, and this has changed, introducing a silent bug in manuals where @documentlanguage isn't used (in particular because it was not needed for manuals in English). It would be much better to have @documentlanguage required[*] so that developers can notice the issue with new texinfo versions and fix it. [*] possibly allowing an empty value for developers who do not want to specify a language (though I currently do not see a reason for that). -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
