[tex-live] [LONG] Improving TeX package classification and the associated documentaion

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Wed Jul 4 13:43:28 CEST 2007


Hi Florent,

On Die, 03 Jul 2007, Florent Rougon wrote:
> Actually, I was in a hurry and answered a bit quickly here: for really
> simple stuff such as a list of tags, I'm open to other formats than XML
> (e.g., RFC-2822[1] would be OK).

Agreed, whatever, but not xml ;-) It is a pain for such things.

> What I'm opposed to is embedding machine-parseable information in a
> freeform file such as a README file. IMHO, if we want to put

ACK-ed several times.

> slightly scary for real newbies. But IMO, people able to maintain LaTeX
> packages shouldn't be afraid of such a common and straightforward
> syntax.

The problem is not the syntax, the problem is to have an easy way to get
decent information from it. I am already reading through stuff to just
read in the XML files of the catalogue and get some nice Perl hash from
hit, ie, nice structured. The problem with XML *IS* actually its
extensability. We want to have a certain level of extensability, and not
the full fledged one XML provides. This makes it parsing a pain in ...

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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