Re: Info download service

On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 10:35:38PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
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> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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> 
>   > > Some centralization is important for reasons beyond convenience.  We
>   > > need to give the community a centralized method of finding the
>   > > official GNU manuals, and the translations whose translators we at
>   > > least are in contact with.
> 
>   > Agreed.  But there should also be non-GNU manuals.
> 
> I think the question of qhat issue we are discussing has not been
> entirely clarified.  I got the idea, a few days ago, that we were
> talking about managing development and release of translations of GNU
> manuals.  You seem to be bringing up a different issue.

We drifted somewhat from that discussion towards resolution of link to
non installed manuals, be them translated or not.  This issue of knowing
where the manuals are to resolve links is, in my opinion, better to
consider in that context.  It is particularly relevant for translated
manuals, but not only.

> Both issues are useful but we had better not mix them up.

It seems to me that they are necessarily mixed up to some extent, as the
code in the info readers and in the Texinfo processors will need to
handle in a similar way GNU and non-GNU manuals.  For GNU manuals, we
should probably set up some kind of "authoritative" information on where
they could be found, but the code that would handle getting manuals
should be the same, and would need to handle links to non-GNU manuals
too.  Even for the "authoritative" information, I think that it could
make sense to do the same for non-GNU manuals, possibly in the same
file, in particular for manuals that are linked to often from GNU
manuals.

-- 
Pat