Re: translations of GNU manuals

[Karl Eichwalder]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

> Ah.  It looks to me like gcal attempts to install only the language for
> current system.  It seems better to install everything.

Agreed.  As we do with message catalog; we can offer a variable
(LINGUAS_DOC, say) and use LINGUAS as a fall back value; Andrew seems to
think similar.  The user can say

    LINGUAS="de fr he" ./configure

to install these three message catalogs only (just tested with gettext
0.11).

> The only reasonable approach I can think of is
> $(infodir)/$(LANG)/*.info
>
> And since the overwhelming majority of distributions don't have any
> translated manuals, I think putting English manuals directly in
> $(infodir) is still reasonable, for now.  $(infodir)/en could be a
> symlink to `.' ...
>
> The dir file can be hand-edited to include whichever manuals in
> whichever order is desirable at the local site.  In practice, the dir
> file pretty much has to be hand-edited anyway.

This all sounds good to me; we should give it a try.

Andrew Clausen <address@hidden> writes:

> gettext uses LANG and LC_* to find message catalogs. How?
>
> Apply a similar algorithm to info.
>
> man also seems to do it right...

As a German user (de_DE) I don't like this feature at all and I think
it's plain wrong to force the user to read non-English documentation as
long as you cannot guarantee to the translation is up-to-date or--if it
is not--to display the orginial (as gettext does for program messages).

That's why I'm using:

    alias man='LC_MESSAGES=C man'

:)

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