[tex-live] Proposal for collection reorganization

[Ralf Stubner]

karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) writes:
[...]
> 	merge other scientific packages
> 	(units, scipaper, textopo, algorithm,...)
> 	into a new latex-science
> I suggest putting those scientific packages simply into
> collection-science [if it remains] instead of bothering with
> latex-science.  Is there any significant non-latex science?

Indeed, I think that is only one collection that is meant here. Whether
one should call it 'science' or 'latex-sicence' is a differnet issue.
Since you asked why to introduce such collections, I guess I could add a
bit of reasoning here.

As Norbert said, this proposal originates from our discussion on TL in
Debian. There is one important difference between TL proper and TL in
Debian: In TL proper you can install individual packages defined by a
TPM file, while in TL in Debian you can only install complete Debian
packages at a time. These Debian packages follow roughly the collections
in TL. The result is that eg the texlive-latex-extra package is really
huge and can only be installed all or nothing. We have had users asking
for a more finegrained splitting, and IMO it makes sense to try to
achive this.

Now in principle we could just implement this in Debian. However,
Norbert does not want to diverge to much from TL proper, and I think
that TL itself could profit from a more finegrained splitting, too. I
have installed TL on win32 machines a few times, and it always took me
ages to find the packages I wanted in the huge list of packages in
latex-extra. I don't know what the unix installer looks like, but with
the win32 installer it would have been helpful to have smaller
collections which can be searched easier.

cheerio
ralf