[translations] Re: [PATCH] Update & announcement

[John Mandereau <john.mandereau@xxxxxxxxx>]

Le mercredi 09 décembre 2009 à 01:19 +0000, Graham Percival a écrit :
> Only if you accept responsibility for making it work in makeinfo,
> texi2pdf, and texi2html.  This duplicates 10 or 20 commands in
> macros.itexi.  That's one file.  When you change a manual name,
> you need to update 4 lines of texinfo.

4 lines of Texinfo multiplied by the number of languages, which
completely changes the deal.  I'm sorry to contradict you whenever there
is such an issue in docs whose annoyance is multiplied by the number of
languages (currently seven), but as you already did at least one thing
in several languages (renaming general to web, only three languages),
you probably see what I mean.


> IMO, the "time saved" vs. "time spent"... including debugging any
> fancy macro games in all the doc-building programs, including
> debugging any problems that people with other versions of those
> tools have... is totally not worth it.

All this is wrong:
- this change wouldn't involve the build system at all;
- we don't have to support different versions: texinfo.tex is included
in sources (and TeX is stable enough so it doesn't matter), we already
require a specific version of Texi2HTML, and makeinfo syntax support is
stable enough;
- we can hardly predict which future decisions will make us create,
split or renames manuals.

That said, this issue has a medium priority on my to-do list (FWIW the
low priority items are supporting translations of automatically
generated documentation, i.e. the markup command lists, the Internals
and consorts).


> No.  Even if you had such a patch already written, I veto it.
> - how are tools like emacs texinfo-all-menus-update supposed to
>   play with the new macro?

I don't know, but such tools (like our current maintenance and build
scripts too) are broken by design, unless they use a real parser, which
is not unreasonable for a quite simple language like Texinfo.  That
said, this is the only real reason I see for not doing this right now.


> - we'd lose internal consistency if we ever wanted to change the
>   section name

I don't understand this point.

> - again, the benefit vs. time spent is totally not worth it.

This would be done using regexp substitution, so there would be quite
little time spent on this.


> Duplicating the node/section name is a basic feature of texinfo.
> It's not a big deal.

It makes translation a bit more tedious, though.

Cheers,
John

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