Re: translated manuals output file and directory name/location

On Sat, Aug 08, 2026 at 01:14:20AM +0200, [email protected] wrote:
> > Then we could also support looking for translated manuals in other places,
> > such as under subdirectories of the infodir.  However, one concern is
> > excessive disk access on slow file systems.
> 
> There will never be lots of directories, as this is limited by the
> number of languages.  Conversly theree can be a lot of files in the
> directory or directories, but this is the same independentely of the
> choice of one directory or one directory per language.
> 
> > just have one directory, or a few directories, all that is required is
> > to load each directory listing from disk, and then scan each directory
> > listing for a file matching the pattern.  If there are language directories
> > potentially many more directories need to be loaded: for example, if there
> > are three infodirs each of which has 15 subdirectories, the number of
> > directories to be loaded increases from 3 to 48 (3 * (15 + 1)) - that could
> > impact the user's experience negatively due to an increase in control latency.
> 
> It is very unlikely to have 15 subdirectories in all the infodirs, in
> practice there would be one with many language directories
> (/usr/share/info typically), there would be little reason for other
> infodirs to have many languages subdirectories.

You just have to install one manual with 15 translations three times (e.g.
under /usr/share/info, /usr/local/share/info, and under the home directory in
somewhere like $HOME/local/share/info).  help2man.info appears to have
at least 10 translations so this does not appear that unrealistic.


> 
> -- 
> Pat