Re: Where to contribute manual translations ?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 18:05:41 -0800
> Cc: vincent.b.1@hotmail.fr, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > And if we are going to have separate directories for each language,
> > both under doc/ and under info/, why do we also have to name the files
> > FOO-fr.texi or FOO-fr.info?
> 
> I had in mind a shared directory for all translations, but we would
> compile them to separate directories under info such that
> 
>     doc/translations/misc/ses-fr.texi
> 
> compiles into
> 
>     info/fr/ses-fr.info
> 
> In the info/$LANG directories, we would put a separate `dir` file.
> Then we could simply add those language specific directories to
> `Info-directory-list' based on the locale, I think.

Using subdirectories in the Info hierarchy is problematic: not only
will we need to tweak Info-directory-list, we'll also need to
coordinate with Texinfo so that the stand-alone Info reader supports
these subdirectories (which means either that INFOPATH will need to
include them, or that the Info reader would need to be modified to
search those subdirectories without them appearing in INFOPATH).

Come to think of that, adding those directories to Info-directory-list
is also not the best idea, since there will be eventually many such
subdirectories, and the search for Info manuals will become much
slower as result.  We could teach info.el that FOO-fr.info should be
in the "fr" subdirectory of each directory in Info-directory-list, or
have stuff like "(fr/ses-fr)." in DIR, but how is this better than
just having ses-fr.info in the info directory to begin with?

So I think having MANUAL-LANG.info files which are translations of
MANUAL.info to the various languages LANG, and having them in the same
single directory, is the best alternative, as its impact on existing
code and distros is minimal, almost non-existent.

> The main purpose of having "ses-fr.texi" is to avoid having several
> files with the same file name under version control, which I personally
> find very confusing.

I'm okay with having subdirectories in the doc/ directory, if that has
some, even small, advantages.