Bug#536476: install-info: The DIR file is generated translated in certain situations
On Fr, 10 Jul 2009, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> 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
update-info-dir by default does NOT update /usr/local/share/info/dir,
but only /usr/share/info/dir.
> be affected by his personal preferences and the value of the
> LANGUAGE variable, in particular.
That is what would be achieved by my patch, because it would unset
LANGUAGE and then load /etc/environment, the system wide settings.
> 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.
If those values are in /etc/environment, the will be in you env anyway.
Most display managers and shells evaluate this stuff.
The idea behind unsetting LANGUAGE and resetting it from /e/environment
is that some user specific setting is not taken account of.
> 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.
Hmm, I guess that many people will disagree on that. If I setup a system
for our local school, I want the info index (dir file) to be as far as
possible in German, isn't that the idea of localization in the end?
If a sysadm does not want this, he can set the right language/locale in
/etc/environment, like I am doing to
en_US.UTF-8
so that I get English with UTF by default.
> 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 is a bug in Emacs. AFAIR emacs still not is *really* unicode, but I
might be wrong here, not much emacs in use here, mostly for long tex
documents.
> (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.)
?? I prefer info, it is much faster than starting emacs!
Best wishes
Norbert
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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org> Debian TeX Group
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