[tex-live] distribution policy (was verbatimcopy package missing)

[Robin Fairbairns]

Ulrike Fischer <news2 at nililand.de> wrote:

> (But I don't know to which extend sources are needed as nowadays a lot
> of documentations includes external objects like graphics. Are the
> source of such external objects required too? E.g. if I make a diagram
> with a spreadsheet program and a graphic with say tiks or pstricks in
> another document and then include this diagram and the graphic in my
> document and perhaps also attach a pdf to my documentation, is then the
> spreadsheet, the code of the graphic and the code of the attached pdf a
> required part of the source? As far as can see this is not the case,
> graphics and diagrams are taken as is. But if major parts of my document
> would consist of imported graphics or of attached pdf's without sources
> this would probably count as cheating.)

i reckon a document that needs a non-public text font is still usable
(with care) by those who don't have that font.  however, a document that
needs an image is unlikely to be satisfactory without it.

> > (These are my personal views, not those of TUG.)
> > 
> >     % This is the source of csquotes.pdf. This file is primarily included
> >     % in the distribution for legal reasons. It will not compile as is
> >     % because it depends on unpublished classes and packages.
> > 
> > I was not aware of this.  Or if I was, I had forgotten.
> > Manuel, one of us should look into this when we have a chance.

imo, my paragraph above would allow csquotes.

> "Good example: fontinstallationguide, where we ship the .pdf, and the
> tex code, but you cannot generate the pdf from the tex code, but all
> the text, examples etc are there.
> 
> I really hope that my remark doesn't lead to the removal of the doc of
> csquotes from texlive ;-(.

i don't believe it should.

> For similar reasons as the author of csquotes I can't put sources that
> compile on CTAN, my documentations use unpublished packages, personal
> settings and lokal fonts. And unlike the author of csquotes I don't want
> to put a source that don't compile on CTAN, partly because the sources
> contain a lot of personal comments and I would have to postprocess it,
> partly because I do find it a bit silly to do it "only for legal
> reasons".  

i'm a little uneasy about this.  as i said, i'm not worried about the
fonts issue (unless you're using, say, an exotic symbol font, without
which the document text is actually meaningless).  what are these local
settings (?packages) that can't be included in the preamble of a
document?

> I hope that you don't misunderstand me. My remarks are not meant as
> complains or even as a request to change the TeXLive policy: It is
> absolutelty your choice what you include and what not. I did give my
> packages "for free" and for me this also include the right to distribue
> only parts of the files or even to ignore it completely. 
> 
> Btw: In the case of minitoc it is miktex which doesn't package the doc
> since users complained about the size (the pdf is 27 MB large and
> together with the sources the package grow up to 65MB).

of course texlive gets around this by having separate distributions:
64mbyte .tar.lzma doc (which includes all the documentation related images, of
course), 390kb of source, and 54kb of run files.

minitoc's documentation is outright mad.  i wish we could invent a
mechanism to bring this home to jean-pierre -- he's got to the point
where he doesn't want to upload to ctan (it takes _so_ long) and would
we download his new version, please?

the distribution contains 789 files.  trimming the excesses of the
documentation (all the maps, flags, generated files, etc.) reduces that
to 29!  that set is big enough, in all conscience (because the .dtx
itself is so huge), and of course we don't know what the doc would look
like in the absence of all the linguistic mapping information.

sigh.  should stop ranting and work on diplomacy...

r