[tex-live] texdoc in luatex

Florent Rougon f.rougon at free.fr
Mon Jul 2 13:13:43 CEST 2007


Hi,

Joachim Schrod <jschrod at acm.org> wrote:

> Please note: metadata about available documentation is already part of the TeX
> Catalogue and is maintained by the CTAN team in the upload process.

OK. I'm looking at hyperref's metadata now. I see you already have a
language attribute for each file. Good.

Do you have some way to specify that one of the files is an entry point
for the whole documentation? I think that would be nice.

Also, maybe it would be desirable to have a "type" attribute that at
least says when the documentation is in text format, because text files
don't always end in ".txt" (you can find README as well as README.txt,
or even README.doc in the old DOS times; some packages also ship
README.en or things like that). Or do you prefer to assume that:

  - documentation in text format has either no extension, or ends in
    ".txt"; in this case, README.en is not acceptable and has to be
    renamed to README.en.txt, which:
      1. would cause too much work for you, I fear;
      2. would not work on lesser Operating Systems.

  - non-text formats always provide a recognizable extension in the file
    name.

?

Given the objection raised by README.en, I think a "type" attribute
that is used at least for text files would be desirable. Looking at

  <documentation href='ctan:/fonts/micropress/hvmath/hvmath.txt'/>

from hvmath-fonts.xml, it seems you don't already do that.

Another thing I'm missing is a way to map paths such as:

  ctan:/macros/latex/contrib/hyperref/README

to paths in the installed TL distro. But I think Norbert has the answer
to this question or can put it in the infrastructure scripts.

Last thing: AFAIU, you brave catalogue maintainers are the sole people
responsible for all these XML files. My proposal to embed the metadata
in each CTAN package was aimed at reducing your workload in this area,
because careful package maintainers could then provide ready-to-use
metadata in their uploads to CTAN. Don't you like that?

Is it because you don't trust their input? In this case, you can always
use what we call an "override file" in Debian, i.e. a version of the
metadata that *you* wrote and put at a known place on your servers so
that it takes precedence over the data provided in the uploaded package.

Regards,

-- 
Florent


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