> From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]> > Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2026 21:35:19 +0100 > > 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? 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.
