[tex-live] TeXlive infrastructure

[Karl Berry]

Hi Frank,

    is there some documentation on how the TeXlive infrastructure works?

I've written a few notes in Build/tools/README and Build/cdbuild/README,
but it is nothing very detailed as of yet.  Just started learning my way
around myself last year ...

    Or if not, can anybody explain me where the information for creating
    and updating tpm files comes from?

Well, the packages I updated last year mostly did indeed come from CTAN,
in a semi-automated way.

However, there are plenty of packages, especially the big core ones,
which have not been updated per se in many years, and have just sort of
accumulated.  And psnfss is one of those.  So I am not surprised by the
missing vf's/afm's/etc. you found.  The hierarchies on CTAN are less
than crystal clear, too.

If you have the inclination to figure out exactly which files should be
copied (or removed from) where, that would be great.

    In particular, I'm confused about the fonts required by psnfss: The TeX
    Catalogue has one entry for them, urw-base35, 

I'm not too sure what the distinction is between urw-base35 and psnfss
(both of which have Catalogue entries), for that matter.

    several tpm files, one for each font family.  

One thing I can answer is why each font family ends up in its own tpm.
When Fabrice implemented the mostly-automated tpm updates for texmf-dist
(and texmf-doc), the font family level was pretty much the only way to
do it.  We couldn't make tpm's based on foundries (everything would end
up in "public", etc.), and there is nothing else.  So each font, pretty
much, ends up in its own tpm.

The texmf/tpm/collection-* tpm's which aggregate the various packages
are maintained by hand.

Does that help?

Karl