[tex-live] Feature request: "package dependency" field on CTAN

[Petra Ruebe-Pugliese]

On Monday 14 November 2016 at 00:50:48 +0900  Hironobu Yamashita (h.y.acetaminophen at gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> Petra:
> 
> > For CTAN, the answer to the last question would probably
> > be quite clear:  introduce a new, optional, "depends" element
> > for Catalogue entries.   I think we should discuss this
> > internally.
> 
> Thanks.

 Well, we _did_ discuss this internally ...
 (see below)
> 
 [...]
> 
> [...] will require a lot of work.

 That's the crucial snag ...
> 
> I thought it would be better if the upstream, CTAN, takes some
> new action. It may benefit all the distributions, including official
> TeX Live, MiKTeX and platform-specific ones. Of course this
> request would demand a lot of work to be done by CTAN team
> and others, so I don't insist on the change. It's a mere suggestion,
> so any better ideas are welcome.

 If we add to the Catalogue new fields describing package
 dependencies, users will expect this information to be more or
 less _accurate_ and _complete_.  However, given our resources
 (or lack thereof) it is completely impossible to achieve either
 the one or the other.  Therefore, we would not like to
 introduce such a formal structure but rather accept author's
 hints and relate them, informally, in the last paragraph of the
 description text, as is done already whenever the author
 provides such information in the announcement.

 And, yes, authors should be encouraged to provide such
 information; but another field on the upload form (which 
 is already rather crowded) would probably not be the right
 way and would hardly meet the approval of our webmaster.

   Petra, hoping that authors reading this discussion may
          consider this aspect for future submissions and
          that others may follow their example.

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