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

[Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2024 at 09:37:03AM +0000, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
> > But, for such links to work, we
> > need a facility to tell the Info reader that when a link goes to a
> > manual named FOO.info, it should visit FOO-LANG.info instead.  Again,
> > something that involves a change in Texinfo and in all Info readers.
> 
> What are the practical cases where translating nodes would be a problem?
> 
> 1. I read a manual in English, there is a link with a node in English, 
> it directs to the other English manual.
> 
> It’s the expected behaviour.
> 
> 2. I read a manual in French, there is a link with a node in English, 
> it directs to the other English manual.
> 
> If the other manual exists in French, it is not the proper behaviour.
> 
> 3. I read a manual in French, there is a link with a node in French, it 
> directs to the other French manual.
> 
> If the other manual exists in French, it is the proper behaviour.
> 
> If it does not, we should have an error message that informs the reader 
> that the manual is not translated.

This is already the current behaviour, though it is not possible to know
if the node name is incorrect or untranslated, and I do not think that
we should do something special here.

In any case, if a target manual is not yet translated, to me it is the
responsibility of the translator of amnual linking to it to either link
to the english manual, or to translate the node name in @ref even though
it won't lead to an existing manual and the name may need to be changed
later on to match with the actual name used in the translated manual.
To me both case could make sense depending on many criteria, such as
whether readers are likely to read english, whether manuals are
being translated...

In any case, I don't see any reason to do any automatic redirection in
the Info reader, it should remain simple and be the translators/writers
responsibilities.  Another reason is that it would not be possible to do
the same in HTML, as in HTML it is not possible to check if the target
exists.

-- 
Pat