Comments on TDS 0.9996

[Karl Berry]

    xampl.bib is a file of daft examples

True enough :).  It's there to be sample input for .bst writers and to
test the bibtex program.  Oren suggested that location, so I don't want
to change it lightly.
See http://tug.org/archives/twg-tds/msg02477.html for some discussion.

        base/           btxdoc.tex

    I think btxhak.tex is sufficiently essential (despite its name that
    it should be there too).

It should certainly be there -- along with a whole bunch of others.  The
particular files listed there are just examples.

    using a semi-standard mf generated font containing
    special glyphs getting `auto-installed' by MakeTeXPK in the system
    directory, 

I don't know what more we can say.  Do you have a specific suggestion
for a change in the text?  Or perhaps it's a bug in MakeTeXPK; the thing
mtpk looks at is the filename, so if the filename looks like it's part
of a standard font, it should get installed in a standard place.  Etc.

    There doesn't seem to be any mention in the TDS of where the gray and
    black fonts (as used by e.g. gftodvi) should be located.  I know that

You're right.  TeX Live puts them in public/misc.  That seems like a
good place to me.  I guess that the tds should reserve `misc' as a font
name, as it does virtually everywhere else.

    They seem to have slipped out of some TeX distributions

Which ones?  Did you report it to the maintainers?  Since gftodvi can't
be plausibly used without them, they shouldn't be omitted.

    as a personal note from the UNIX
    world I would prefer src/ as the source directory

It started off being src/.  But src/ isn't traditional anywhere except
Unix, and the TDS tries hard not to be platform-specific.  Also, we
spell out most other names (`metafont' instead of `mf', etc; that was
because we wanted to use `metapost' instead of `mp').  So it seemed best
to spell out `source' too.


Thanks for all your comments.