Re: texinfo-7.2.91 pretest available

On 2026-02-10 19:23:01 +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 10:17:21AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 04:00:17AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > > On 2026-02-06 17:32:16 +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > > > The next pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release (7.3) has been
> > > > uploaded to
> > > > 
> > > > https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.2.91.tar.xz
> > > 
> > > I've tested the Debian/experimental package.
> > > 
> > > > * Language
> > > [...]
> > > >   . if there is no @documentlanguage, the language is unspecified, rather
> > > >     than en_US.  (texi2any will still use English strings by default,
> > > >     but will not put en_US in the output, depending on output format.)
> > > 
> > > This is problematic, because until now, the default language was
> > > the English one. So this will break current manuals that do not
> > > use @documentlanguage (because it was useless).
> > 
> > This is a feature, now no @documentlanguage means that the language is
> > unspecified. As a side note, previously, the language was already
> > unspecified for some output formats, see
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2025-03/msg00076.html
> > 
> > If an author intends to be explicit about the language, the manual
> > should be modified.
> 
> Yes, as Patrice explains the current behaviour is a deliberate choice.
> (It's wrong to term it a "regression".)

The fact is that until now, lang="en" was generated by default,
and this has changed, introducing a silent bug in manuals where
@documentlanguage isn't used (in particular because it was not
needed for manuals in English). It would be much better to have
@documentlanguage required[*] so that developers can notice the
issue with new texinfo versions and fix it.

[*] possibly allowing an empty value for developers who do not
want to specify a language (though I currently do not see a
reason for that).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)