On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 08:49:47PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > > In a way, they are valid failures, as it shows that translation of document > > strings won't work. > > > texi2any needs a locale other than C, C.UTF-8 or POSIX to translate document > > strings when outputting in languages other than English. (It does not have > > be a French locale to translate to French - any locale, like en_US.UTF-8, > > would do.) > > The reason why the translations do not work can be linked to a set of > conditions that could be considered as somewhat independent of document > output strings translations, as these are about translated error > messages. And also are somewhat outside of Texinfo perimeter, as they > may correspond to other software messages. If locales are missing > because one do not want to have translated error messages, it is unclear > to me that not having translated strings in output document is actually > a failure.
It's a failure because the program is not operating as intended. Strings were supposed to be translated in the output but they were not. > We have this implementation constraint that link those two > subjects together, but then it could make sense to accept not to have > translations in output documents if it means having to install > translations for error messages. That doesn't make sense - if users don't want translated messages from programs, that's completely different to strings being translated in output files. Users might not want to be able to get messages in Swedish so they don't install a Swedish locale. But they should still be able to get strings in the output of texi2any translated to Swedish if the @documentlanguage says it's in that language. (For example, they may be processing manuals for upload to a website for download by others.) > It could also be possible to consider that translated output strings are > not needed, if none of the manuals use @documentlanguages. In that > case, translations of document strings may not work while the conversion > is as expected. Yes, it's not necessary to translate strings if a manual doesn't use @documentlanguage. It's still a defect in the functionality of the program, even if the user happens not to want to use that part of the program, which rightly causes test failures. > We could also consider documenting this somewhere if we do not already, > although this also could be considered as an implementation detail. It could be worth documenting the locale requirement as it's required for the Texinfo tests to pass, and for texi2any to function correctly.
