[tex-live] booktabs.sty missing

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz@computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Tue, 9 Jul 2002 12:12:16 +0100


On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 01:03:36PM +0200, Lars Madsen wrote:
> 
> is there no way around this problem?? A lot of people would be missing
> that file.

sorry, its too late for TeX Live. anyone who wants packages with non-free
licenses has to obtain them individually.
 
> I know that the author has vanished, say if he's dead than the booktabs
> package just have to be forgotten or what??

well, actually, he has now finally been contacted, and the package
can reappear. but yes, if he died the package would be frozen
with the copyright statement he left in it, I guess. 

I know this all sounds ridiculous, but this is the rule we chose
to play by several years ago. TeX Live claims to conform to the
Debian free software guidelines, and I have to follow that
once a problem has been found. Of course, all of TeX Live has NOT
been checked properly, and I am sure you can find a bad package
quite quickly, but in the case of booktabs the problem was caught
in teTeX, so I had to act.

-- 
Sebastian Rahtz      OUCS Information Manager
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431