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
