[tex-live] New babel locale files

[Karl Berry]

Hi Javier,

    Babel now includes a directory with locale files for about 200
    languages. They are in the tds bundle, but in CTAN are zipped.

I assume this is CTAN:macros/latex/required/babel/base/locale.zip
aka TL:texmf-dist/doc/latex/babel/locale.zip.

By the way, I see two spurious temp files in that zip,
#babel-be.ini# and #babel-de-AT.ini#.

    which is the best way to package, distribute, etc., those files for
    them to be bundled with TeXLive?

What you have in the .tds.zip looks fine to me as far as the locale
stuff goes.  But the .tds.zip has a separate problem:
makeindex/babel/bbglo.ist and bbind.ist (from bbidxglo.dtx) are missing.
Can you include those in the build? Then I could use the .tds.zip.

It's not critical, but I also see that the standard files, like
germanb.sty, mention compat/ in their comments:
%% This is file `compat/germanb.sty',
But there is no compat/ directory in the .tds.zip, or the source.
So it would be nicer if it wasn't mentioned -- just build the files in the
"top" directory instead of a compat/ subdirectory?

A second not-critical thing is that those same standard files say to
report bugs to Johannes, which has got to be wrong nowadays.

And one other question, just for information: who is maintaining all of
these new files? You? The individual babel-* maintainers, who feed
changes back to you? (The *.ini files have no bug-reporting information
at all, nor does the README-locale explain.)

In any case, it seems a step backward to return to having all this
information in one centralized package. You say in the README they're
essentially "finished" (except for the ones that aren't :), but it seems
highly improbable to me that they will need no maintenance. This is just
the situation we went through with babel the first time, when it was
unfortunately stagnant for many years due to centralized control.

Thanks,
Karl