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

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

> On Jan 11, 2024, at 22:04, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>> From: Daniel Cerqueira <dan.list@brilhante.top>
>> Cc: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>,
>>  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
>> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 12:48:46 +0000
>> 
>>> 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.
>>> 
>>> So it would be good to have some Texinfo feature that would make the
>>> behavior of Info readers more user-friendly in these cases.  Right
>>> now, the Texinfo features that can help are @documentlanguage and the
>>> suggestion by Gavin to have in the translated manual an @anchor for
>>> each @node with the original English name of that @node.
>>> 
>> How come the translator doesn't always know whether a translated manual
>> exists?

Eli replied. But the discussion comes from an exchange on Emacs-devel 
where we raised the issue of incomplete manual “sets” where some 
manuals are translated but refer to manuals that may not yet be 
translated, etc. and that information may or may not be shared in the 
translators’ teams and may or may not be available to the end user, who 
may, or may not install all the translated manuals or only a number of 
them.

Hence the question of how we inform that user that the link she clicked 
on refers to something that may or may not be translated. The temporary 
conclusion is that it would be nice to have an error message that gives 
enough information in that regard, or provide a system that attempts to 
look up existing manuals, etc.

Manuals distributed with Emacs are not massively translated (yet), but 
since they are the place where most of the linking is taking place 
(think of the web of links between the Emacs manual and Emacs Lisp 
reference), it would be nice to find a solution that satisfies the need 
of the Emacs distribution but also of the other TexInfo based manual 
distributions. Hence the discussion being moved here.