[tex-live] Package documentation

Julian Gilbey jdg at polya.uklinux.net
Tue Mar 25 19:54:35 CET 2008


On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 05:29:58PM +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> Julian Gilbey <jdg at polya.uklinux.net> wrote:
> 
> > I've been noticing that the CTAN team is wisely becoming reluctant to
> > install typeset versions of the dtx files, since they have a habit of
> > becoming outdated.
> 
> um, what?  we tend to go out of our way to get documentation that can be
> read on-line.  true, we have switched to pdf form (since dvi makes
> assumptions that aren't necessarily true of all machines), but i've
> created a lot of pdf files for packages whose author hadn't done the
> job.

My apologies.  It's my broken memory - I recall uploading a package a
while back and being told that the .pdf files are no longer being
installed on CTAN.  I may well be mistaken.

> > This makes a lot of sense.  However, I am now
> > hitting a new snag: when I want documentation on some packages when
> > using the Debian 2007 (testing) texlive packages, it seems that I have
> > to go to CTAN to download the documentation or dtx files.  I don't
> > know whether this is because I simply haven't found the documentation
> > on my system or whether it's not been built.  One example that I've
> > recently had was the changebar package.
> > 
> > I wonder whether it's feasible to automatically build the
> > documentation into the appropriate texlive packages?
> 
> there _is_ a changebar.pdf in texlive.  i don't actually know if the
> texlive team build them specially, but since there's one on ctan, they
> don't actually need to.
> 
> i suspect you're observing the typical "documentation takes up space"
> whinge of the packager: debian probably has a separate documentation
> .deb file, which doesn't get installed by default.  (iirc, there's
> separate rpms for fedora texlive, for example.)

Erm, no, I'm just having one of those bad days when nothing seems to
do what I think it will.  I *do* indeed have changebar.pdf on my
system.

Sorry for the noise :/

   Julian


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