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

[Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jan 06, 2024 at 04:40:41AM +0000, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> > I wasn't talking about the manuals.  But even for the manuals there
> > are some issues that need to be considered.  For example: what do we
> > do with the info/dir file for these translated manuals? what should be
> > @dircategory for them -- should it be a separate category, like
> > "Translated manuals", or should it be the same as in the original
> > English manuals?
> 
> 
> I suppose the @dircategory is also what appears in the Emacs info top 
> page under “*Menu:”?
> 
> If that’s the case, what about using “Translated manuals” for now, 
> since the number of translated manuals is very low?

(This is the first email that was CC-ed to help-texinfo@gnu.org and it's
not clear what the discussion is about or what if anything is being
asked, or what the context or history of the discussion is.  Hence,
I find this thread quite hard to follow based on the messages I have seen.)

It's up to people writing the Texinfo manuals what they put for
@dircategory.  In practice it seems that there aren't any well-followed
conventions for this so top-level dir files end up quite disorganised.

There are no conventions that I know of for the @dircategory of translated
manuals.  I think it is fine to translate the category.  For example,
on my system I have a manual "help2man-uk" which is listed with the
category of "Розробка програмного забезпечення", which Google Translate
tells me translates as "Software development".

If desired, users could have a directory containing solely Info manuals
in a certain language along with a dir file containing their dir entries.


> The day when we have a reasonable amount of translated manuals, it will 
> make sense to have them under the original English manuals. I guess it 
> won’t be too difficult to make the change.
> 
> So I guess the info/dir file would list the translated manuals in 
> “Translated manuals” for now.

I don't think that is the best category for non-English manuals as it
is too broad.

> In French that would be
> @author par Ted Zlatanov
> @author traduit en français par Achille Talon

That seems fine to me.

I will read through other messages in this thread and see if I have anything
to add.