TDS Registry

[Rich Morin]

Karl notes that fonts/morin/martian/ is incorrect, suggesting
fonts/*/morin/martian/ instead.  Because there are two intervening
directories, this should really be fonts/*/*/morin/martian/, but I
imagine that I would be better served to claim fonts/*/*/morin/ as
a whole, then create subsidiary entries as desired.  (There is no
purpose served by allowing two font developers to share the same
"supplier" name, and a supplier *should* be able to keep its own
name space clean.)

My Martian fonts could certainly go in as fonts/*/*/public/martian/,
unless I thought I was likely to have competition down the canal (:-).  


My suggestion that "plain" be unique within "/" derives from the
observation that "plain" shows up in several sub-trees.  I don't
think, for instance, that it would be a Good Thing for anyone other
than Dr. Knuth to develop a new package (font, etc.) named "plain".
On the other hand, if a developer has several independent packages
named "foo", it *might* be appropriate for each one to have its own
registration, if only to make it clear that they are unrelated items.

My only reservations on the header info stem from wanting to balance
the need for information with keeping the effort (and fascism) to a
minimum.  We should probably make a template available, with flags to
show which fields are required, etc.


Getting on to mechanization, my current notion is that we need
a multi-stage procedure:

   1.	submission
   2.	sanity check
   3.	public comment
   4.	acceptance

After looking in CTAN/tex-archive/tds/registry (or an equivalent WWW
server), I would submit a filled-in template.  This would be checked
for obvious errors and conflicts, then installed as a "prospective"
registration.  If no conflict arose within (say) 90 days, it would be
accepted as a full registration.

PTF would certainly be willing to assist in any effort to generate
registration information from our (or others') documentation files.
It may be, however, that the public comment period should be longer
for this sort of "mass registration", as it could take longer for any
problems to be spotted.

-r