[tex-live] Better ways to find packages and documentation

[Norbert Preining]

Hi all,

On Fre, 06 Jul 2007, Florent Rougon wrote:
> > A package can be split among a TEXMF tree and several bin/<platform>
> > trees.  There will be certainly one database for the whole system.
> 
> So, you're contradicting Norbert here. Which changes the infrastructure
> from which the DB is built.


category package
	all in texmf-dist
category documentation
	all in texmf-doc
category Collection, Scheme
	only dependencies on other stuff
category TLCore
	mixed, texmf and bin/*

> I'm getting a bit tired of this discussion (and I physically cannot type
> too much anyway, and we've now gotten to the point where I have to slow

I agree.

> When your file formats are ready and contain the data I asked for, I'll
> write a bridge from yours to mine.

I think I already said what we will have:

per package:
	tags <tag1> <tag2> <tag3> ...
(all on one line, no space in tags)

in docfiles:
	docfiles size=.... 
	 file1 attr1="val1" attr2="val2" ...
attrI is not allowed to contain spaces, valI can contain spaces, but no `"'

These stuff will be included from the Catalogue at texlive.tlpdb package
build time.


Locations are not my thing, this has to be answered by Reinhard. I don't
care for this ;-)

>       2) They will have to suffer from the constraints imposed by the
>          tlpdb format, such as no space in file name, no double-quote in
>          attribute values.

The first thing shouldn't be a problem. I guess not even Miktex has
RELATIVE pathes with files containing spaces (all could be below some
dir with spaces in the path, but not the rest of the full path)

> is not desirable, things won't be in TEXMFLOCAL or TEXMFHOME, but in 
> /usr/local/share/progname and ~/.progname/. But the feature will be
> there.

Ok, sounds reasonable. But still you *could* use the proposal I made:
- specify some file format
- specify a location in TEXMF trees
- search TEXMFLOCAL (ev TEXMFHOME) for such files

> If Perl doesn't have a module that can reliably parse XML using the
> basic features (not even namespaces), then it must be a really crappy
> language.

Please let us stop this discussion. I *can* parse xml, perl has the
ability.

> >      <key>: <value>
[...]
> The (small) advantage is being able to parse it not by hand, but by
> using reliable standard libraries, for languages that provide such
> libraries. And using a standard file format allows one to use tools such
> as grep-dctrl on the DB files, which can be quite nice.

Stop. If you want
	<key>: <value>
then I can switch tlpsrc and tlpobj IMMEDIATELY. This is trivial. If you
say that this has some advantages then we can do the switch. NO problem.

Just let me know. Reinhard will use the perl modules, I can adapt the
perl modules in 5min. Then some sed magic for the tlpsrc files and we
are done.

In fact I first wanted to have this, too ...


Best wishes

Norbert

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