[tex-live] Suggestion for future releases

[Robin Fairbairns]

Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:

>     Would it be possible to put in some verification in the Catalogue
> 
> Well, the CTAN folks maintain the Catalogue.  I am not sure what the
> story is on the file: url's, how they are determined, who might be using
> them, etc.
> 
>     Since the catalogue is quite often what you get as output from
>     "texdoc"
> 
> Interesting.
> 
> As it happens, I removed the catalogue package from TL development a few
> days ago, since it seemed to serve no purpose and is always out of date.
> It seems like overkill to have the entire Catalogue just for these
> references, especially when you have found that they are typically
> wrong.

the catalogue is a *lot* better than it was at the time the texlive 2005
snapshot would have been taken.  (i've spent an inordinate amount of
time on it, and i've got watchers on it, enabling me to correct for
things like disappearing websites and so on.)

however, it does get snapshotted, so if anything changes after texlive
is built, then the change isn't in the catalogue.  is this the problem?
-- because if so, it seems a rather arcane complaint: the catalogue in
texlive refers to what's in texlive rather than what's current...

> As I said before, a lot could be done in this area.  The texdoc shell
> script seems pretty simple.  If someone would like to volunteer, writing
> a new texdoc in Perl that is smarter about finding files, allows an
> override file, etc., does not seem terribly hard to me.  (Writing it in
> Perl means it would have a chance of working on Windows.)  Anyone?
> 
> Regarding the other suggestion, adding texmf aliases seems like the
> wrong way to go.

i agree the revised script is the way to go, with script exceptions
rather than texmf exceptions.

how would such a change interact with texdoctk (which i hardly ever
use)?  i started thinking about a replacement a while back, and i could
be interested in a small development project (but i know neither tcl nor
tk).

r