[tex-live] datestamp in texcat

[Alexander Cherepanov]

Hi Norbert!
On Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:20:32 +0200, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

>> I see that most packages in tlnet version are "relocated" but many are
>> not. What does it mean?

> that is for a feature I am working on, namely using tlmgr to manage
> user trees, so that a user without write permissions to the main
> installation can use tlmgr to fetch packges and install them into
> a user tree. Not in tlmgr by now, in development.

Cool, that's a useful feature.

> Only packages which are relocated can be installed in user trees, and
> that are exactely those packages that do NOT span multiple texmf trees.

I see.

>> The package descriptions in tlnet version are not stripped from utf-8
>> symbols (apostrophes, dashes and probably others) while such symbols
>> are converted to ascii in master copy. For example, compare the
>> descriptions for AkkTeX package. Hope that's ok.

> Thanks for noticing that. ANother point we forgot. We have recently changed
> the code that the tlpdb is purely ascii (we had too much problems on
> different archs with the utf8 chars). THe only source for the utf8 chars
> were anyway the catalogue which is not of central importance.

BTW when html tags are stripped all formatting is lost (paragraphs are 
joined, line breaks are gone etc.). Are there any plans to improve 
this?

> But since change package descriptions etc do not trigger a package
> update from Master tlpdb to tlnet tlpdb they are still old.

Is such a complicated behaviour really useful? Automatic import from 
external source is dangerous but, as we see, such buffering causes 
some problems and the catalogue is probably trusted enough to 
automatically import from it. Or there are other reasons to not update 
descriptions etc. automatically?

Alexander Cherepanov