Bug#536476: install-info: The DIR file is generated translated in certain situations

[Yavor Doganov <yavor@gnu.org>]

Norbert Preining wrote:
> 	unset LANGUAGE
> 	if [ -r /etc/environment ] ; then
> 		. /etc/environment
> 	fi

> Do you agree?

This will solve the major issue I experience now, but I really
recommend you to ask for upstream's opinion on this, because:

1) It is typical to set INFOPATH to /usr/share/info/,
   /usr/local/share/info and $HOME/share/info, so that the user has
   access to all the documentation installed via various routes.  If
   the local admin runs install-info to update the system DIR file in
   /usr/local after installing a package there, the result should not
   be affected by his personal preferences and the value of the
   LANGUAGE variable, in particular.

2) For some reason on one of my gNewSense workstations the contents of
   /etc/environment is:

   PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
   LANGUAGE="bg_BG:bg:en_GB:en"
   LANG="bg_BG.UTF-8"

   I don't have a clue how these values got there (I've never set
   LANGUAGE this way, for instance), and compatibility with Debian
   derivatives is probably not of big concern, but it is perhaps
   something to think about.

3) In my view the system locale should only affect files that are not
   readable by mortal users and also serve as a default for newly
   created accounts.  Any file that is expected to be read by the user
   of a multi-user system such as GNU should not be created with
   translated text.

4) Emacs should really show the text properly if the DIR file is
   encoded in UTF-8, the font is capable to display the glyphs and
   `current-language-environment' is set to "UTF-8", which is my case.
   (That's definitely not a bug in _this_ package, but it is a bug
   given the fact that for Texinfo upstream and literally almost
   everyone else Emacs is the recommended Info reader.)