[tex-live] language, lang, la (was: testing TL'08)

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 08:42:09PM +0200, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 6:31 PM, Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 08:31:22PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
> >
> > * Language names are a mess in texmf-doc, examples:
> >
> >  texmf-doc/doc/german/
> >    german: lshort-german
> >    de:     pdf-forms-tutorial-de, voss-de
> >    ge:     FAQ-ge, texlive-ge
> >    <none>: remaining directories
> >  texmf-doc/doc/english/: english, en
> >  texmf-doc/doc/french/: french, fr
> >  texmf-doc/doc/vietnamese/: vietnamese, vn
> >  texmf-doc/doc/korean/lshort-korean/: kr, ko
> >
> >  * I don't understand "ge". Either use "german" or the
> >    two letter ISO country code "de".
> >    The first two letters of the language name must not be used,
> >    this would lead to clashes. For instance, what would be "sl":
> >    "slovak" or "slovenian".
> 
> Definitely Slovak.

Not definitely. Currently you don't know whether `sl' is a
two letter ISO country code or a two letter abbreviation
of the language name.

Therefore I strongly suggest to get rid of the
two letter abbreviations at least and to replace them
by the two letter ISO country codes in order to get
unique two letter codes.

> But if you want to support language-specific searches (like LANG=sl),
> you probably need a list of language names (pairs of language_code,
> language_name). Then, if someone wants "de" for example, you know that
> you need to look into subfolder of texmf-doc/doc/german

In the long term we should have an easier way.
For example. The German `lshort' is named `lkurz', but I doubt
someone wants to maintain a list of translations for lshort.
Thus there should be a symbol link that can be guessed
with `lshort' and 'de' without `german' or `kurz'.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>