> Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:26:37 +0200 > From: Patrice Dumas <[email protected]> > Cc: [email protected] > > 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.
So you want to have a directory 'foo' with *_LL manuals, with a subdirectory 'foo/LL' where the file DIR of the *_LL manuals lives? Isn't that an unnecessary complication? Info readers generally search each INFOPATH directory for manuals, not just for DIR files, so the above will also be less performant. > > 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 It is just a menu. It is very large even without translations, and no one has yet complained. The reason, to my mind, is simple: users rarely if ever look at that menu. And in any case, AFAIR the first thing that an Info reader does is concatenate all of the DIR files it find into a single DIR node. So the file might be smaller, but the menu in the Info reader will be of the same length. Assuming, that is, that you are not suggesting to also have separate INFOPATH_LL variables, and use just one of them at a time. Which I don't think to be a good idea, because users will likely need to consult at least some untranslated manuals. > 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. It does? How? I'm probably missing something.
