[tex-live] texlive 2003 -- acronym package missing doc

Harald Harders h.harders at tu-bs.de
Wed Feb 11 14:10:25 CET 2004


On Wed, 11 Feb 2004, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> > In my opinion, it is one of the main tasks to define a procedure that
> > guarantees the documentation to be installed, too. At work, I have a teTeX
> > installation with all documentation installed. It is nice simply to type
> > in "texdoc packagename" and to get the documentation.
>
> I agree, its good if that works. With either decent
> metadata; a sufficiently intelligent installation script; or
> a reasonable anount of time, it would be possible to achieve
> this. Unfortunately we don't have any of those!
>
> > But this is problematic because you don't know how often it has to be
> > compiled, which extra programmes have to be used (e.g., makeindex, bibtex,
> > etc.).
>
> I run all of them, always, on every file, several times.

But you are not possible to guess which makeindex styles to use or how to
generate glossary-like environments.

> > Weren't it possible to test whether doing latex on the dtx file
> > compiles without error and if so take the precompiled dvi or pdf file?
>
> how do I know what the dvi or PDF file is made from?
> how do I know which dtx file to run?

Is this really important? For me it seems clear that a prebuilt dvi or pdf
file with the same base name as the package is the corresponding
documentation. Don't you agree?
  It is more complicated if the documentation has another name, e.g., for
hyperref (manual.pdf).

> > Have you spoken with Thomas Esser how he chooses the documentation file
> > for teTeX? I've never had problems with missing documentation files there.
>
> Thomas is a lot more careful than me, is the simple answer.
> And has to deal with quite a lot smaller collection of packages.

That is true, of course.

> my answer is, as always, metadata.

Do you have some kind of idea how this could look like? Should the
metadata contain the commands to produce the style/class files as well as
the documentation? I think, a Makefile could do the job, e.g., for
numprint:



dirs:
	mkdir -p tex/latex/numprint
	mkdir -p doc/latex/numprint
	mkdir -p source/latex/numprint
tex:
	latex numprint.ins
	cp numprint.sty numprint032.sty tex/latex/numprint/
doc:
	pdflatex numprint.dtx
	pdflatex numprint.dtx
	makeindex -s gglo.ist -o numprint.gls numprint.glo
	makeindex -s gind.ist numprint
	pdflatex numprint.dtx
	cp numprinttest.tex README numprint.pdf doc/latex/numprint/
source:
	cp numprint.dtx numprint.ins source/latex/numprint/
	cp numprint032.dtx Makefile souce/latex/numprint/
texlive: dirs tex doc source



Then, the automatic procedure could be to start
    make texlive
or similar for every package. The advantage of using makefiles is that
this is a common known format. You just have to declare which tags have to
be used, e.g., that every makefile has to provide the tag "texlive".

Yours
Harald

-- 
Harald Harders                           Langer Kamp 8
Technische Universität Braunschweig      D-38106 Braunschweig
Institut für Werkstoffe                  Germany
E-Mail: h.harders at tu-bs.de               Tel: +49 (5 31) 3 91-3062
WWW   : http://www.ifw.tu-bs.de          Fax: +49 (5 31) 3 91-3058



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