[tex-live] [luatex] luaotfload-database.lua error with TeXLive SVN

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2014-02-05 at 18:07:03 +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:

 > Who is responsible for this program?  Neither --version nor --help
 > gives any contact (which is also a bug IMHO).

Hi Werner,
the answer to this question might be interesting to others too, so
I'll try to answer it more generally.

The easiest way to find out who is responsible for a particular
package is to look at

  http://ctan.org

and use the search facilities.  CTAN provides data from the TeX
Catalogue, unfortunately except email addresses.  The advantage of
CTAN is that it mentiones the *current* maintainer(s).  If someone
encounters a problem with an older release it's not helpful to contact
inactive maintainers.

Since the CTAN team rejects everything which isn't accompanied with a
clear license statement for more than a decade, we can assume that one
of the files listed by

   texdoc -l <package name>

contains the information you are looking for.

There might be other ways to find out who's responsible for a
particular package but IMO CTAN is the best choice.  Just because it's
up-to-date with regard to *current* maintainers.

It's a pity that email addresses are not provided by CTAN.  They still
exist in the Catalogue XML database.  Robin told me that they are not
exposed to the internet anymore because someone (obviously a troll)
complained.  IMO it's ridiculous but legal aspects can't be ignored.

A possible solution could be to extend the CTAN upload interface by a
button which allows package authors to confirm that they agree that
their email address is exposed to the web.  I'm sure that $\infty - 1$
authors agree.

Another solution could be to expose email addresses unconditionally if
they appear in at least one of the uploaded files.  It shouldn't be
too difficult to look for email addresses with grep -r.  With
pdftotext even the content of PDF files can be passed to grep.

I'm not a lawyer but I suppose that legal problems can only arise if,
and only if, the files in a particular package don't contain any email
address.

It's amazing to see what a single troll can destroy.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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