[OS X TeX] R, paradigm to bring into the LaTeX world?

[Denis Chabot]

Hi Gerben,
Le 06-10-23 à 20:00, TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List a écrit :

> What should happen IMO is that something large like the TeX Live group
> effort  would integrate such improved functionality. This would  
> amongst
> other things require tighter control of TeX packages, something that
> will be very difficult to achive. TeX packages are a chaos, license-,
> organization-, documentation-, installation- and other-wise. It  
> will be
> impossible unless a dedicated effort is being made to shoehorn
> everything back into one paradigm. MiKTeX does this, but it requires a
> separate set up distribution that is manually maintained. teTeX was  
> the
> same.
I'm not sure how packages appear on CTAN or not. R could be  
considered hectic too. There are about 850 packages written by people  
all over the world on the CRAN site (in addition to base R). And many  
more outside CRAN. My understanding is that people who want their  
package to appear on CRAN must submit it to a committee, along with  
documentation that follows very specific format and guidelines. The  
committee submits it to a battery of standard tests for compatibility  
with base R. This makes the package posted as source code. OS-based  
subcommittees then compile for their OS (the one dear to me is of  
course the OS X group), and if it passes some more test, its Mac  
Binary is also posted.

Again I stress this is my understanding of the process. But I am to  
understand that anybody can post their LaTeX package on CTAN with no  
testing at all? If so this is one place where change could start. You  
want your package to be on CTAN, then follow the guidelines. Nobody  
forces you to be on CTAN, so you can leave your pacakge out of it if  
you do not have the time to follow the guidelines.

Of course implementing this with a huge load of pacakges already on  
CTAN would require some drastic action...

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