[tex-live] bibtex tools in TL

[Karl Berry]

Hi Lars,

    why aren't tools like bibextract and bibtool present in TL?

1) Including any new nontrivial program (unlike packages) is a
   time-consuming manual process, and there are not enough hours in the day.

2) It is necessary to support srcdir!=builddir to be included in the TL
   source tree, at least without forcing extra-special painful hacks (see 1).

Although Thomas and Sebastian wrote a bunch of teTeX/TL Makefile.in's
for various utilities years ago, there's nobody actively pursuing such
things now.  It's hard enough for me to keep them up to date (not that I
entirely succeed).

If you (or anyone) have the energy to integrate the programs into TL and
hopefully send the patches back to the authors, that would be great.

    as far as I know both are GPL'ed.

Yep, licensing is not the problem.

karl