[tex-live] new babel in TL

[Karl Berry]

Hi - wanted to mention that the new babel release, made some time ago on
CTAN, is now in TeX Live for tonight's update.  Thanks to Javier Bezos
for doing all the work on the package and Robin Fairbairns for lots of
timely assistance on the Catalogue/CTAN side.  Here is Javier's
announcement of the original major update (current version is 3.9c):
  http://www.mail-archive.com/ctan-ann@dante.de/msg05446.html

For TL purposes, the new regime is to have the per-language support
files (*.ldf, etc.) in their own packages, which are now uniformly
named babel-<langname>.  The <langname> is what was used in babel before
(i.e., there is no particular consistency in style among them).

This included renaming a few babel-support packages which were
previously installed independent of babel, namely:
  friulan german romansh serbianc spanish   
These are now all named babel-<lang>.  (Their content is unchanged.)

Overall, on CTAN, these are the subdirectories of
macros/latex/contrib/babel-contrib.

One special case is magyar/hungarian.  No need to go into the whole
backstory; the bottom line is that Peter Szabo's magyar.ldf (previously
TL package magyar, but not installed in the runtime) is now
the package babel-hungarian, and *is* in the runtime.

I assigned these new babel-* packages to the various collection-lang*
collections as best I could.  I plan to review the whole status of the
language collections with an eye toward not having so many that are so
tiny, but one thing at a time, and the first thing was just to get the
new babel into TL at all.

Given the sweeping variety of changes that had to be made, it would be
astonishing if there were not unforeseen failures, at any level.  So
keep those bug reports coming.

Thanks,
Karl

P.S. Probably-confusing note that I'll mention anyway: although the
*.ldf files are almost all in separate babel-* packages now, the *.sty
files which are installed for compatibility are still part of babel
proper.  So, for example, with the core babel package you get
albanian.sty but not albanian.ldf.  Of course, everything is installed
by default (with scheme-full), but if you intentionally deselect some
languages, you may notice the discrepancy.  Of course, the remedy is
simply to install the collections for the languages that you use.