[tex-hyphen] shortdesd, longdesc of hyphen-<language> & CTAN

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 10:33, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>
> i had understood that shortdesc and longdesc *always* came from ctan, if
> ctan is the source.

One can also provide the information in tlpsrc files for TeX Live.

>> The majority of
>> packages entirely lacks any description at all.
>
> there are certainly ctan packages that lack a description, or even (in
> some cases) a catalogue entry.  hyphenation patterns often lack
> description, since the original authors often submitted them without any
> explanatory text -- in which case the catalogue entry only contains
> a description if i happen to know something about the background.
>
> i can certainly plug in a description for one that's missing it, given
> some text; if you'll alert me to where you've updated tlpsrc (and hence
> texlive.tlpdb) i can back-fit it.  what i don't know is whether there is
> a danger of things not appearing in tlpdb if they're not in the relevant
> catalogue entry.

The main problem with current packages is that there are many
languages that don't have an entry at all and those that do have an
entry are often referring to an outdated hyphenation file (often
saying that patterns are outdated).

So now TeX Live fetches data from descriptions of outdated patterns.
In order to fix the situation one should first create "visual
packages" of some kind that would properly refer to the new up-to-date
hyphenation files.

But it might be best if I first try to do something and then come back
with a result, so that we won't start a purely teoretical discussion
(it might take me less time to implement things than to explain what
exactly I want to do).

Mojca