Bug#536476: install-info: The DIR file is generated translated in certain situations
Norbert Preining wrote:
>
> 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,
> update-info-dir by default does NOT update /usr/local/share/info/dir,
> but only /usr/share/info/dir.
If I do `install-info --info-dir=/usr/local/share/info doc/foo.info'
after installing the foo package in /usr/local, it surely does.
> > 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.
GNU install-info is a C program, so I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that
your code snippet is Debian-specific (I admit I haven't checked the
Debian source and the modifications for the recent transition from
dpkg's to GNU's variant). Now I see that you're talking about
/usr/bin/install-info which is a temporary script until the transition
is completed. Still Debian-specific.
> If those values are in /etc/environment, the will be in you env anyway.
> Most display managers and shells evaluate this stuff.
Yes. My idea here was that /etc/environment could be unreliable to
workaround this problem from upstream's (or Debian's in case you care
for derivatives) point of view, because it seems that some distros
tend to put all sort of clutter there.
> > 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.
Most definitely. I don't claim that I'm right here, I just expressed
my understanding. I don't purport that I'm a capable sysadmin either.
> 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?
Not if you have students of other origin or the school is an
international one. Rare, but a valid use case.
One of my users has this setting:
LANGUAGE="el:de:it"
with the default locale set to el_GR.UTF-8.
She is a native Greek, living and working in Germany, but graduated as
Italian philologist. She speaks all these languages fluently, and
prefers them in that order. And she doesn't want any
Bulgarian/Russian things in the way despite having an account on a
machine with a system Bulgarian locale.
> 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.
Thanks for the hint.
> That is a bug in Emacs. AFAIR emacs still not is *really* unicode
Yes, but it's not related to Emacs' internal represenation of the
characters, as I get the same behavior with the soon-to-be-released
Emacs 23.
> ?? I prefer info, it is much faster than starting emacs!
Well, I exaggerated a bit, OK. It is much faster, but also buggier
and more limiting. Sergey Poznyakoff has fixed many of the notorious
bugs recently. But for Karl the standalone reader has always been
second priority, TTBOMK.
(I'm an info user as well, on slow machines where I don't dare to
start Emacs.)
I'll check more thouroughly this issue in the upstream's tracker + the
Debian BTS, and clone to emacs22, if you don't object.
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