[tex-live] lua path

[Norbert Preining]

Hi,

I normally try not to get involved too much in these IMNSHO
useless discussions, but well , here we go.

On Mo, 09 Dez 2013, Philip Taylor wrote:
> Since, in the opinion of the TeX Live cadre, most questions
> are stupid, if one is to judge by the responses that Norbert
> et al are wont to give, then the simplest thing would be
> to modify TeXdoc to simply display the text "If you need to
> ask, you are too stupid to use TeX", regardless of any
> parameter(s) passed.

Why and from what do you deduce this completely wrong misinterpretation.

I just supported Adam that texdoc is for searching TeX documentation.
And find that *IS* hard.

You might think:
$ perldoc omlette
No documentation found for "omlette".
$

should give an example, right? But there is one problem: Perl documentations
are *registered* with the perldoc system, while TeX documentation
are at best *listed* but not classified.

Now, *you* or *anyone* here can come up with an intelligent parser that
understand all current and future requests/input by users and answers
appropriately?

You might say, if there is no simple match, just say "not found", but
that would make texdoc *much* *much* less useful, because now you
can search with very unspecified terms and texdoc tries to find something
matching.

Now, what you are proposing is:
* remove the advanced search ability, cutting of many users from easily
  finding documentation
* include a fall back modus "not found"

I strongly disagree that this is a good approach.

And of course, we can add special cases in texdoc,  something like
(in pseudo code):
	if ($input matches {perl,tcl,ruby,sh,bash,foo,bar,baz,cat,brum,omlette, omlet,...) {
	  then echo "Sorry, no idea what you mean
but again - where does it end.

> -\infty.  There are no stupid questions, there are only stupid
> answers, of which yours (IMENSHO) is just about as stupid as an
> answer can get.

That is such an worn out platitude that I cannot hear it. This is normally
brought forth when there are no other arguments.

$ whatis the meaning of liff?
the: nothing appropriate.
meaning: nothing appropriate.
of: nothing appropriate.
liff?: nothing appropriate.
$

Simple answer to all the questions and complains posted here:
	Send a patch!
End of my contribution.

Norbert

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PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
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