[tex-live] Proposal for collection reorganization

[Hans Hagen]

Frank � wrote:
> Staszek Wawrykiewicz <staw at gust.org.pl> wrote:
>
>   
>> Hans, we discussed that 2 (or 3) years ago
>> ("can we separate supp-miss.tex and supp-pdf.tex from the whole
>> context package, so latex (and even plain pdftex) users could use that
>> without installing the whole context?"). The answer was "no" and I 
>> undestand your arguments. As those files should go into _the same_
>> tex/context/base/ directory along with other context files, we cannot
>> make separate package for them, as it would break the whole concept
>> of packaging. 
>>     
indeed, i'm not going to put generic context files under tex/generic; 
too much work for me, and of no use either; it would also make my own 
source tree hard to maintain
>
> I don't understand that.  Why shouldn't it be possible to have two or
> more tpm files put ordinary files into the same directory in a TEXMF
> tree, and remove only their "own" files when they are removed?  Maybe
> I'm missing something specific to TeXLive, but generally I would say
> that this is exactly the point of "packaging".  At least if this is more
> than just zip'ing up things, and keeps a list of installed files around
> or in the installation program.
>
>   
indeed, the only trickery is to make sure that when users have installed 
context and want to de-install latex, that the supp- files stay there, 
but i happily leave that to the packagers; i assume that tex is not the 
only package where files are shared
>> So we are at the same point for TL and other distribution,
>>     
>
> Linux distributions surely do *not* have that problem; we can just move
> supp-*.tex to a different deb/rpm than the other context files.
>   
the files probably could be put in (say) tex/plain/generic/context or so, if one can assure that context (when used) does not see them first (which i would expect from alphabetic ordering) but that too much depends on the way the file system is written; if the texmf.cnf file is ok, then context will search its own directories first, so that's no problem either, apart from more tricky updating and so; 

Hans 

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