Which place for docs in French, German, etc?

[Michel LAVAUD]

To: TWG-TDS@SHSU.edu
Subject: Re: Which place for docs in French, German, etc?

David CARLISLE wrote:
> I would have thought though it would be clearer all round if
> understandable names for the directories were used, rather than codes,
> after all the doc area is for humans. I suppose the codes are to avoid
> deciding on whether to use the English name for the language, or the
> native spelling. I would have though either (even inconsistly) would
> be better than codes. One could take babel option names as a first
> choice (which doesn't help in French as babel accepts both french and
> francais...) 

Well, I agree completely that doc area is for humans, and that
"french" or "francais" are clearer than "fr". But choosing "fr"
or "french" or "francais" is a problem only with the scheme
doc/package/language, not for the scheme I propose.

With the doc/package/language scheme, it is a problem because,
each time the user goes into the doc folder, he will see
explicitly the name "fr" or "french" or "francais", for each doc
file.

With the doc/language/package scheme, the user has to know what
means "fr" or "french" or "francais" only once, at installation
time. After that, he has not to bother any more with it, he uses
the name he has coined himself for the doc folder. So, it would
be even completely innocuous to assign names "l1" to English,
"l2" to German, "l3" to French, etc. ISO codes of languages seem
the best choice for me (especially because my installation
scripts use "en" for English, "fr" for French and "de" for
German, which appear to be ISO codes, according to M. Goossens
and Pierre MacKay ?).

Just for the sake of comparison, the CD-ROM "Bonus pak" for OS/2
has the following directories, under the root of the CD:

br      Bresil
cf      Canada francophone
dk      Denmark
fr      France
gr      Germany
it      Italy
la      Latin America
nl      Nederland
no      Norway
po      Portugal
sp      Spain
su      Finland
sv      Sweden
uk      United Kingdom
us      USA

"uk" and "us" reflects here, I suppose, the fact that this CD-ROM
is related both to language and country, as it deals also with
hardware (fax and connection to Internet) which have probably
different specifications for different countries (?).

Michel Lavaud  (lavaud@univ-orleans.fr)