[tex-live] Improving or rewriting texdoctk
Florent Rougon
f.rougon at free.fr
Sun Jul 1 20:00:19 CEST 2007
Hi,
Frank Küster <frank at kuesterei.ch> wrote:
> Have you talked to Thomas Ruedas about that? I think he also considered
> this. Maybe he has some code (but you'd have to read Perl, which is said
> to be harder than to write it...)
I didn't talk to Thomas for these reasons:
1. I don't want to write anything significant in Perl.
2. If we go the debtags[1] way (see later mails), the changes to do
are not trivial at all and thus warrant a full rewrite; which, for
me, means Python.
3. If not, well, the main thing that remains to do is to make texdoctk
able to assemble the database (/etc/texdoctk/texdoctk.dat) from a
set of files provided with each LaTeX package. AFAIS, this is a
simple matter of concatenating the files, and thus is trivial.
I'm pretty sure you asked Thomas to do that a long time ago and we
haven't heard any signs of progress since then, so I assumed it
would be faster for me to reimplement in Python than having Thomas
actually work on this feature.
[ The only remaining thing I can think of (excluding the switch to
a debtags-like approach) is tagging the documents with the
language they are written it. I was about to say it's trivial
(simply add a language field to the db) when I saw it is already
partially present in texdoctk.dat:
l2kurz;Short Introduction to LaTeX (german);latex/general/l2kurz.pdf;tutorial, introduction, basics, german
But not all documents are tagged this way:
KOMAg;KOMA-Script User's Guide (german);latex/koma-script/scrguide.pdf;tutorial, introduction
gerdoc;German styles (old/new orthography);generic/german/gerdoc.dvi;
caption2a;caption manual (german) (caption);latex/caption/anleitung.dvi;figures, tables
etc.
Well, it would be slightly more work to make the GUI able to
limit its view to a user-specified set of languages, or to
display the language a doc is written as part of the doc lists,
but this is secondary: I believe we can already take advantage of
language tags with the Search button. ]
The problems with the trivial approach (as opposed to the debtags route)
are the following:
- a simple static hierarchical classification as currently implemented
in texdoctk is never completely satisfactory: when writing the
metadata for packages, we (ideally upstream authors) will have to
find the proper category, and sometimes:
* there are several relevant categories;
* or there is no appropriate category.
- if all the documents in TL are referenced this way, I think we'll
end up with either of these problems:
* too many categories to be usable (imagine starting texdoctk and
having 50 categories or so to choose from);
* some categories will have too many documents in them to be
conveniently browsable.
That's why I was thinking of implementing a debtags-like approach, which
could actually be used to classify LaTeX packages, not only their
documentation (it would be ridiculous to have an excellent way to
classify and browse LaTeX documentation and no corresponding way to
browse through the packages, since there is most of the time a very
clear relationship between one package and one or more doc files).
[1] http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/
--
Florent
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