[tex-live] Matching TL package setups to my own

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Fri Aug 24 01:31:19 CEST 2007


Hi Gerben,

    The basic idea (as I can gather) however is

Right, basically.

    Scheme-gust and scheme-tetex for instance depend
    on both Collections and Packages directly. 

That's normal and unavoidable.

    collection-langcyrillic has files. 

That I'm surprised about.  I'll change it.

    there are chunks (these contain files) 

Sounds like TL packages.

    and there are sets of chunks.

Sounds like TL collections and schemes.  If you want to call them
"subsets", go right ahead.

If it'll help you if we rigorously enforce that collections (or
"subsets") don't have files themselves, that's ok by me.

    this information is also already there in the file lists.

But the way that information *gets* into the (autogenerated) file lists
is by having the category in the (hand-maintained) .tlpsrc file.  

I can agree it is not theoretically necessary.  The tlpdb generator
could, in principle, search all texmf* trees for the package info.  I
would like to have our packages be able to cross the texmf boundaries,
it would be very helpful for things like perltex, but I am highly unsure
as to what will be affected.  It's never been done that way before, and
would need to be tested before we make such a sweeping change.

    I think we have in fact just one thing (as reflected in TLPOBJ), 

Since we have TLPOBJ now, I don't exactly see what you're proposing
that's different.  A different way of thinking about it, I guess.

    We could still tag the subsets with properties. 

So, if you like, think of the "category" field as a property of the
TLPOBJ.  Since, as you point out, there are presently no rigorous checks
for the different "levels", they are in fact already all equal, it seems
to me.

    I was also wondering if all subsets should have complete dependencies.
    ...
    version checking for dependencies. 

I don't disagree in principle with either of these ideas, but I know of
no way to implement them.  Dependency information is simply not
available.  Often the authors themselves don't even know which versions
are compatible with which other versions, and certainly no one else
does.

    I think it would be better if CJK would depend on collection-latex.

I don't mind adding that particular dependency.  I can see that that one
could make a difference in practice.

As things stand, I have simply continued Sebastian's practice of adding
dependencies when told about important ones.

Best,
K


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