On Sun, Jul 19, 2026 at 09:28:32PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > > > My feeling is that a dir per language should be the best option in the long > > run. A possibility would be to have LL/dir and either an explicit > > search path set by the user, or set based on the locale. This would > > probably require adding some information on the document language > > install-info can get from installed Info manuals. > > > > It could also be possible to fallback to the english manual in the Info > > reader if the language is not found. > > > > And it could also be useful to have a virtual menu in the Info reader > > where all the translations of a manual can be found. > > > > Note that implementation could wait a bit, as there aren't that many > > translated manuals, but I think that it would be nice to have a design > > ready. > > > > comments, thoughts? > > I don't understand how this would work, when there are both translated > and untranslated manuals on the system. Having LL/dir goes against > your previous proposal to have all the manuals in the same directory > by appending _LL to the names of the translated manuals.
I have not checked the code, but do no think that it goes against my other proposal, as I think that the location of the dir file and of Info manuals can be different, and I do not think that the Info readers search relatively to the (dir) directory, or at least not only. To me, the dir file, conceptually is only the list of Info manuals, not of their locations, the Info manuals are found independently. Hence the proposal to have the list in a subdirectory, because the "dir" name is fixed, while the manuals that have a disambiguated name can all be in the same directory. > And having > several DIR files in the same directory is unsupported by Info > readers, so it's a backward-incompatible change. It would not be the same directory, as it would be in LL, like /use/share/info/LL/dir > Why not have all of them in the same DIR file? I see no reasons to > separate them by language. After all, DIR is just a bookkeeping aid: > most users of Info should never see it. For two reasons, first, if there are many translated manuals, they will be a distraction in the main dir, and for a user that only understand one or two language, having all of them in a main dir makes the listing too long. I also think (but I did not read the code), that restricting what is in the dir also restricts the scope of the Info commands that apply on all the manuals. -- Pat
