[tex-live] TL build and missing files?

[Karl Berry]

    Now, I think the idea was that texmf-dist contains the packages and 
    stuff, while texmf contains the stuff installed by a make install. 

Sorry -- this is mostly, but not entirely, the case.  Unfortunately
(perhaps), there's a fourth category of files -- files which are needed,
which don't easily belong to packages, and which have never been
installed by make install.  texmf is used for those too.  Don't want to
create a *fourth* tree, it's bad enough already ...  As a practical
matter, everything about web2c, kpathsea, etc. is in texmf.  It would be
an enormous hassle to change this.

texmf-dist and texmf-doc have strict rules, in that the tpm files for
them are entirely generated automatically (by Tpm.pm), based on package
names -- so that some package "foo" *only* contains files within
directories named "foo".

texmf, on the other hand, has hand-maintained pattern-based tpm's, so
the rules are not as strict.  This is a good thing.

Some time ago, I put a terse README in each texmf* directory, explaining
the situation as I understand it.

    It seems to me that the stuff in Master is not 'pure' in that it is
    not only stuff that has been created with make install? How did the
    *.tcx files get there?

They were simply installed there by hand.  I believe there are many
others, too.

You might argue that everything in texmf that is not installed by make
install should be.  I don't disagree; that would mean creating some
dummy data package in the source that does nothing but copy the files
from source to Master.  That could be ok as a project for next time.