[tex-k] Re: Bibliography

[tim@maths.tcd.ie]

> Comp.text.tex is useless.  

This is not my experience.
I just checked -- I have posted 9 queries to c.t.t. over the last year,
and got illuminating responses to every one of them.
Looking at the newsgroup now,
almost all queries seem to get several replies.

It is my impression that Robin Fairbairns and Sebastian Rahtz
are actually spending more time than they ever have done
on answering queries.
The world of LaTeX is enormously in their debt
for putting their apparently bottomless font (n.p.i.) of knowledge
at our disposal.

There is admittedly a certain tetchiness creeping into Robin's replies,
but that is the privilege of an elder statesman.

On the critical side, I think texdoc -- a most useful command in my experience --
could be made even more useful by a little re-organisation.

And to repeat a suggestion I have made before,
it seems a pity one cannot modify the xdvi path
in the same way as one can TEXINPUTS, etc,
so that DVI documentation could come up automatically.

Finally, I wonder if submission of packages
could not be made a little more formal (XML-ised?)
so that people had to give short descriptions, etc.
(Some of the Linux mailing lists seem to do this a little better,
eg Ryan Weaver sends out well-structured descriptions of new RPMs -- 
roughly the same number as new LaTeX packages, I would guess.)