[tex-live] [LONG] Improving TeX package classification and the associated documentaion

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Mon Jul 2 07:08:02 CEST 2007


Hi Florent,

thanks a lot for the interesting proposoal, I do see only one problem:

On Mon, 02 Jul 2007, Florent Rougon wrote:
>   Each package (in the sense of CTAN package, not Debian) contains an
>   XML file that specifies the following:

How will we ever get at this? Furthermore I would prefer *not* to have
new stuff on CTAN. I would suggest to add this information in some way
to the TeX Catalogue (where it belongs). Another problem is that
sometimes packages on CTAN don't directly ship documentation files, but
they have to be created.

If we restrict ourselves to TeX Live we can use the
	docfiles
entry in the TeX Live database, but there are no tags on these files in
any way (and currently no way to tag them, but this can be changed).

If we have to tag all the stuff that would be impossible. OTOH we cannot
urge the package writers to write some tag specification. Furthermore
there are those packages which are not supported anymore, i.e., no one i
responsible for them.

One way out of this dilemma I see is:
- we migrate the CTAN upload procedure to the experimental one currently
  in testing phase
- we encourage package writers at upload time to add some tags (drop
  down lists, checkboxes, whatever)
- documentation files could be gathered automatically from the ctan2tl
  script which would be executed in the background

This way slowly stuff would get tagged, and for old packages one of us
would have to take the work to go through them.

Herzliche Grüße

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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