Metadata for the TeX Live Guides

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2019-12-13 at 15:58:45 +0900, Takuto ASAKURA wrote:

 >
 > Hi Karl, Norbert, and All,
 >
 > I noticed that there are no doc metadata in the tlpdb for
 > the TeX Live Guides. For example,
 >
 > name texlive-en
 > category TLCore
 > revision 51878
 > shortdesc TeX Live manual (English)
 > [...]
 > docfiles size=1355
 > [...]
 >  texmf-dist/doc/texlive/texlive-en/texlive-en.html
 >  texmf-dist/doc/texlive/texlive-en/texlive-en.pdf
 > [...]
 >
 > How about modifying the lines to:
 >
 >  texmf-dist/doc/texlive/texlive-en/texlive-en.html details="TeX Live documentation (HTML)" language="en"
 >  texmf-dist/doc/texlive/texlive-en/texlive-en.pdf details="TeX Live documentation (PDF)" language="en"
 >
 > and doing similar for other translations?


Hi Takuto,
AFAIK metadata in tlpdb come from the TeX Catalogue maintained by
CTAN.

The TeX Live Guide isn't maintained by CTAN.  A solution could be to
provide an additional XML file which contains metadata for files
maintained by TeX Live only.

I don't know where "shortdesc" for the TL Guide in tlpdb comes from
but maintaining an additional Catalogue for the few files which exist
in TeX Live only makes more sense to me than maintaining the stuff in
the software which creates tlpdb.

As far as other translations are concerned:  The Catalogue didn't
support language tags from the beginning.  Actively maintained
packages have a language tag already.  Adding language tags to older
packages is a lot of work because the process cannot be automatized.
Furthermore, the XML sources of the Catalogue are not available to the
public which prevents users from sending patches to CTAN.

With other words, missing language tags is a known problem.  But they
have to be added to the Catalogue, not to the software which creates
tlpdb.  Just to separate program code and data...

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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