[tex-live] TeX Live suggestions

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 05:07:44PM -0800, Donald Arseneau wrote:

> Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de> writes:
> 
> > > and each package in it should come with user documentation, but that's another
> > > story...
> > 
> > A text version could be automatically extracted from the package file,
> > see appended perl script and saved and provided as "url.txt" that
> > can then be found and presented by texdoc.
> 
> Should I extract the textual documentation and send it to ctan?
> In some of my other packages I delimit the instructions as so:
> 
> %====================== BEGIN INSTRUCTIONS ===========================
> %====================== END INSTRUCTIONS ===========================
> 
> and I should also do that with ulem.  I at one point thought that
> texdoc would be able to extract on the fly.

I think, having a .txt file in the TDS:doc// tree is better than
adding special handling for special files in `texdoc'.

The current texdoc version defines aliases for url, ulem, ...
that redirect the request to the .sty file, excerpt from texdoc.cnf:

  ...
  alias ulem = ulem.sty
  alias underscore = underscore.sty
  alias url = url.sty
  ...

> Hmmm, the version on ctan is 2000 whereas my copy is 2004, so some minor
> fixes went unreleased.

CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/misc/url.sty has file date 2007/12/10
(dante server) and identifies itself as "ver 3.3 12-Apr-2006",
the same version of the copy in TeX-Live 2009.

> On the other hand, I am not averse to making a crude LaTeX document
> out of the instructions.  Should I do that and avoid special handling?

Of course, formatted LaTeX documents are easier to read.
But naturally it costs time to write them.

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