[tex-live] Broken dependencies among sty files in TeX Live 2009 distribution

Philipp Stephani st_philipp at yahoo.de
Sun Oct 25 22:33:51 CET 2009


Am 25.10.2009 um 21:45 schrieb Robin Fairbairns:

> Philipp Stephani <st_philipp at yahoo.de> wrote:
>
>> Am 19.10.2009 um 17:12 schrieb Norbert Preining:
>>
>>>> here.sty		verbasef.sty		required
>>>
>>> that is a pain, since verbasef.sty is in ltxmisc, that should be
>>> fixed.
>>> but again, here.sty is not on CTAN .... pity
>>> since it is sooo old maybe it should be moved to obsolete on CTAN
>>> as it can anyway not be run
>>
>> Why is here.sty missing from CTAN? It can easily be found at various
>> places on the Internet like
>> http://www.bl.physik.uni-muenchen.de/bl_rep/styles/here.sty
>> and if there are licensing issues, it should be easy to contact D.
>> Carlisle.
>
> the licence doesn't exist.  david carlisle asked that all copies  
> should
> be destroyed.

OK, then it's reasonable not to include it. OTOH, including verbasef  
is then nearly pointless.

> but people like www.bl.physik.uni-muenchen.de don't care for author's
> requests, it seems.

It's impossible to remove something from the Internet once it's there.  
David Carlisle probably has better things to do than to check whether  
each and every copy of here.sty has been deleted. There seem to be  
many users of here.sty, actually.

>>>> inicap.sty		amsrbeta.sty		required
>>>
>>> inicap is not on ctan, no idea ...
>>
>> But it does exist on the Internet, including source code:
>> http://web.mit.edu/texsrc/source/latex/amsrefs/inicap.dtx
>
> but that's just a copy of an obsolete version of amsrefs.
>
> it's the same story:
>
> amsrefs has moved on, just like the provision of "here" facilities.
> some people insist that it's better to install a withdrawn package for
> this facility than the one that's currently distributed.
>
> but the author doesn't distribute the package any more, so we don't
> either.
>
> just the same as we don't put biblatex on m/l/contrib ... because the
> author doesn't want us to do.

That's very reasonable! However it is not so nice that TeX Live  
contains nonfunctioning packages. So perhaps simply deleting the  
packages in the second column of the list is easier than requesting  
rewrites of packages like verbasef that might have been abandoned long  
time ago. I think backwards compatibility has never been the most  
important thing for TeX Live anyway.
Another option would be to create a new here.sty that just loads  
float.sty. Could this break something?


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