Best location for package configuration files

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-04-25 at 12:04:05 +1000, Andrew Mathas wrote:

 > Hello!
 >
 > I recently submitted the WebQuiz package to ctan and hence texlive
 > and miktex. The package uses tex4ht to create web pages and in
 > order to use it you first need to copy some css and javascript
 > files on your web server. Currently I put these configuration files
 > into the webquiz doc directory, and the executable for the package
 > looks for and installs the files from there, but it has been
 > pointed out to me that this is not ideal because installing the
 > documentation is optional.
 >
 > Is there a better place to put these files?

I don't think so.  Putting configuration files into the main texmf
tree is not a good idea because this tree should only contain files
which are not supposed to be modified by users.

It's true that documentation can be omitted at install time but this
is highly deprecated because almost no package can be used without
documentation and disk space is not a problem these days, even on the
tiniest computers in use today.  So I think that the doc tree is a
good choice.

If your config files are located in the doc tree, texdoc -s will find
them.  Additionally, if your documentation is a PDF file created with
LaTeX, you can use the embedfile package in order to embed the files
in the document itself.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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