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

Joachim Schrod jschrod at acm.org
Tue Jul 3 01:03:13 CEST 2007


>>>>> "GNW" == George N White, <George> writes:

>> >   - the most important packages (geometry, graphicx, etc.) will get
>> >     tagged in a reasonable timeframe by either their maintainer or by
>> >     volonteers (yeah, could be me, but preferably some LaTeX guru :).
>> 
>> I am *very* sceptical that you will find gurus that will help in
>> tagging packages. Otherwise the Catalogue would not be maintained
>> by just a handful of persons (and Robin does 80% of the work there
>> singlehandedly), such gurus would give a hand there, too.

GNW> Maintaining the Catalogue requires special insights. [...]
GNW> I do like the idea of using tags better than the texdoctk fixed structure,
GNW> but to succeed tags should be user maintained.

I have nothing against tags and would find an experiment to enable
user-defined tag associations to TL packages quite interesting. I
wanted to mention that the wish that LaTeX gurus would engage in such
activities is not realistic.

Besides, I'd like to mention that maintaining the Catalogue does *not*
require special insights, IMNSHO. I change entries not so often, as
I'm only involved in upload work when Rainer Schöpf is on holidays. 
(Rainer and I are the sysadmins of the German DANTE systems.) Adding
or changing a Catalog entry just means to read the README or the
supplied information, detect the most current version ID, and check
where the documentation is. This is the basic stuff and it covers 90+%
of the work. (Well, the main difficulty is that one should be thorough
enough not to introduce XML syntax errors -- otherwise the build of
the HTML version fails. ;-)

	Joachim

-- 
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Joachim Schrod				Email: jschrod at acm.org
Roedermark, Germany


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