[tex-live] Package documentation

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Zdenek Wagner a écrit :
> 2008/3/27, Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk>:
>> it's not (quite) as bad as that: the html (as is the way) has a poor
>>  structure, but all the information is in xml, from which the html is
>>  generated.
>>
>>  this is better news only in the sense that deriving the database you're
>>  imagining isn't going to be (quite) as bad as you might think.
>>
Well, that's what I was hoping, actually, since the html files are generated,
one can think that the source files are more easy to use. Unfortunately, I
couldn't look to the source files, since the only link I found to them (from
http://tug.org/texlive/pkgupdate.html, pointing to
http://dante.ctan.org/svnroot/texcatalogue/trunk)
requires authentication.

> It's sometimes important to store not only the file name but also its
> location. For instance, several manuals have the name
> manual.{dvi,ps,pdf}. If I type "texdoc manual" in TL 2007, a
> manual.dvi (written in Bengali) is displayed. If I know that I want
> the manual for Velthuis Devanagari, I can type "texdoc
> velthuis/manual" and I get manual.pdf from the doc/generic/velthuis
> directory.

Indeed. There was also the same problem with hyperref's manual for a moment.
Often one needs using 'texdoc -s' or even 'locate' to find the doc for the
first time, and then remember the good keywords to have texdoc find it next
time. Automating this, either using a documentation database, or coding some
good heuristic for texdoc, could be a relief for the user.

By the way, the same kind of problem happens to me when I type 'texdoc live':
I get the TeX Live manual, right, but in Chinese. So I think another
interesting thing to add to the documentation database possibly extracted from
the catalogue sources would be a language field of any kind, that texdoc could
use.

Manuel.