Re: translated manuals output file and directory name/location

On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 08:37:26AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > I was looking at how manpages translations are handled.  On my system,
> > there are language directories under "/usr/share/man".  (For example,
> > "/usr/share/man/de/man1/cups.1.gz" is the "cups(1)" man page in German.)
> > However, it doesn't appear to be possible to access them with the "man"
> > command without having the locale installed for that language, e.g. if
> > I run "LANG=de man cups" I get an error message:
> > 
> > man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
> > 
> > - as I don't have a locale de_DE etc. installed.
> > 
> > Not sure if that is a model worth imitating or not.  It would be useful
> > to find out what the experiences of readers of non-English manuals was.
> 
> At least for us the maintainers of GNU packages, the above model would
> be a significant annoyance, because it makes it hard to read and
> modify a manual for an arbitrary language.  Installing a locale,
> especially if it is some special or exotic one, and turning it on is
> not always possible, let alone easy.  What if I want to read the
> manual translated into some language because someone reports a mistake
> there, or just because I'm interested or maintain manuals in several
> languages? why should I need to install and turn on a locale for these
> cases?

In my proposal, there are diverse ways to have a language directory be
used, the locale, but also manually changing INFOPATH, an environment
variable, or a variable (that could be set from the command line too).

> More generally, IMO the time where internationalization was identical
> to localization has long passed.  We live in a multilingual world,
> where several different languages and scripts are routinely used on
> the same computer at the same time, and frequently in the same
> program.  Selection of a document written in a certain language should
> no longer be tightly coupled to the locale, only the default might be
> derived from it.  A locale defines many other settings that are truly
> system-wide and should be obeyed, but the language of the documents
> that I can easily choose should not depend on it.

In my proposal, the locale is only a way to select the directory used,
there are others as I describe again above.

I also proposed the same than Gavin, have a way to show in a virtual
directory all the translations of a manual.

-- 
Pat