Info download service

[Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2024 at 02:49:12PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.

This would be great to have on GNU/Linux distributions that don't install
many Info manuals by default (such as Debian-derived distributions due to
GFDL woes).  Users could opt in to Info manual downloads once, and then
get many uninstalled manuals easily, rather than having to spend time
working out how to install them every time (usually finding the exact
package name needed in the distribution package manager).  Currently,
"info" is not very helpful for manuals that aren't installed, giving
no clue about how to get the manual or even if one exists.

I can imagine that implementing such a thing may have complications,
though.