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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 14:49:12 +0100
> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
> Cc: jean.christophe.helary@traductaire-libre.org, stefankangas@gmail.com,
>       vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org,
>       help-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Having nodes linking to non installed manuals is, in general, an issue.
> But I do not think that defaulting to the english manual for non english
> manuals is a good thing to do.  Instead, it could be confusing,
> especially if the missing translated manual is not shown prominently and
> an english manual is substituted without much information and would not
> convey the intention of the manual writer.

I guess there are disagreements about the best course of action in
these cases: some think it is better to produce an error message,
while others think falling back to the English version of the manual
is better.  So this will most probably be a user option, so that each
one could customize what happens.

> In my opinion, it would be much better to design a way to help with
> installing a manual that is not already installed but exists and is
> linked to irrespective of the issue of translations and still leave the
> responsibility to setup the cross reference to the translator.  Having
> some way to check node links in Info through automatic downloading of
> manuals and check of all the referencecs could be nice too, but without
> any special treatments of manuals not in english.

This is a much more complex solution, and it has some problematic
aspects: it requires a network connection and some users consideer
such features an annoyance.

> Having @anchor indeed can help if the translator wants to link to the
> english manual with translated node names.  Still, in my opinion, it
> should only happen if the translator has setup the @ref to link to the
> english manual by using the english manual name as @ref manual argument.

Having @anchor with the English node name will allow cross-manual
links to go to a translated manual if it exists, falling back to the
English manual: all it takes is try to find manual-LANG.info (when the
user's language is LANG) before falling back to manual.info.  Whereas
cross-references with the translated manual could use the translated
node names instead.  This will also allow translators not to bother in
cross-references about translations of node names in other manuals:
they could simply use the English node names.

> On the contrary, I think that having translators be responsible of cross
> manual references is the best possible solution.  It could mean a link
> to an english or translated manual based on a choice and not on an
> automatic rule.  In that case, a choice seems to be better to me.

Yes, it will probably need to be a user option.