[tex-live] Package documentation

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi,

Robin Fairbairns a écrit :
> um, what?  we tend to go out of our way to get documentation that can be 
> read on-line.  true, we have switched to pdf form (since dvi makes 
> assumptions that aren't necessarily true of all machines), but i've created
> a lot of pdf files for packages whose author hadn't done the job.
> 
By the way, thank you (and all the CTAN team) for this. I think it's very
useful that the doc be readable on-line and on all platforms.

Following this idea, I believe the doc should also be easily accessible
locally when it is present. For this, texdoc is a great help, but sometimes it
doesn't find the doc, since it cannot guess the name (eg, amsldoc.pdf,
pgfmanual.pdf, beameruseguide.pdf). I noticed the name is usually given in the
corresponding TeX catalogue page (thanks again to the CTAN team, I suppose),
and I wonder if it would be possible to make texdoc check that field of the
catalogue (or a documentation names database extracted from it) in order to
find and display the doc ?

I don't know if the change should be made in texdoc, or the packaging, or
whatever, so maybe this suggestion is a bit off-topic there, maybe not.

> i suspect you're observing the typical "documentation takes up space" 
> whinge of the packager: debian probably has a separate documentation .deb
> file, which doesn't get installed by default.  (iirc, there's separate rpms
> for fedora texlive, for example.)
> 
Well, I just looked and it appears that in Etch (TL2005) the file
changebar.pdf.gz was in texlive-latex-extra, but now changebar.pdf is in the
new package texlive-latex-extra-doc.

Manuel.