On Mon, Jul 20, 2026 at 02:14:12PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Patrice Dumas <[email protected]>
> > For two reasons, first, if there are many translated manuals, they will
> > be a distraction in the main dir
> 
> It is just a menu.  It is very large even without translations, and no
> one has yet complained.  The reason, to my mind, is simple: users
> rarely if ever look at that menu.

Still, if all the manuals are translated to many languages, this will be
much worse.

> And in any case, AFAIR the first thing that an Info reader does is
> concatenate all of the DIR files it find into a single DIR node.  So
> the file might be smaller, but the menu in the Info reader will be of
> the same length.  Assuming, that is, that you are not suggesting to
> also have separate INFOPATH_LL variables, and use just one of them at
> a time.  Which I don't think to be a good idea, because users will
> likely need to consult at least some untranslated manuals.

I do not think that using a separate INFOPATH_LL is good, more like
* users can manually add the /usr/share/info/LL directory to their path
  to get the LL language specific dir that is in that directory concatenated
* a command-line option, or a variable (or a special symbol in
  INFOPATH?) could trigger that a locale environment variable is read,
  which allows to get the LL language(s) specifier(s), could be LANGUAGES,
  for example, or similar, and based on that value, the /usr/share/info/LL
  directory would be added, which would contain the LL specific dir file.

> > I also think (but I did not read the code), that restricting what is
> > in the dir also restricts the scope of the Info commands that apply
> > on all the manuals.
> 
> It does?  How?  I'm probably missing something.

My wild guess is that for the rare Info commands that apply to all the
known manuals, such as ‘M-x index-apropos’, the concatenated dirs are
used to read all the manuals.  I may be wrong, the directories in
INFOPATH may be scanned instead.

-- 
Pat

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