[tex-live] EC license

Alexander Cherepanov cherepan at mccme.ru
Sun Aug 30 21:20:50 CEST 2009


Hi Robin!
On Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:13:58 +0100, Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

>> >> OTOH rsync://rsync.tex.ac.uk/CTANcatalogue/entries/e/ec.xml contains:
>> >> 
>> >>   <license type='lppl'/>
>> 
>> > (on the whole, it would have been better if you hadn't mentioned that
>> > rsync access to repository on an open archived list.  i have suppressed
>> > it.)
>> 
>> Not sure what's the problem but sorry for that.

> the repository also contains email addresses and other personal
> information.

I suppose it contains some info that is not available from packages 
doc, some privately communicated addresses etc.?

>> Where is the official home for sources of tex catalogue then? The main 
>> page (e.g., 
>> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html ) points 
>> to http://sarovar.org/projects/texcatalogue/ but last update there 
>> seems to be from 2006-09-27. Or did I miss something?

> a closed repository on dante.de

Then tex catalogue is non-free with all consequences.

> at one stage we were using a cvs repository on sarovar, but it was
> getting slower and slower, and eventually we switched to the present one
> on dante after a period of nearly a week when we couldn't update
> anything.

I see, thanks for the info.

And links to sarovar should probably be updated on pages like
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/catalogue.html .

> the files exist on ftp.tex.ac.uk because i need them for generating the
> catalogue search and so on; i was asked to provide them to someone or
> other for a reason i've forgotten, and so i did, on the condition that
> they kept quiet about it.  i've been monitoring the traffic (in a
> desultory way) but knew that the thing would get out eventually and
> would therefore have to be shut down.

IMHO it's hard to expect that a public rsync module on a popular rsync 
server will go without notice for a long time. I mean I just rsynced 
rsync.tex.ac.uk and spotted an interesting module in the shown list. 
It worked and didn't have any indications of a private status, so I 
assumed that it's ok to use it. OTOH when module is called "CTAN: 
Internal mirroring only" and says "access denied" on connection 
attempts it's quite clear it's private:-)

Hm, maybe it's not evident to admins that rsync shows full list of 
modules to anyone. I've seen some private rsync servers with 

> i'm now told it was used for valuable work.  very tiresome.

Alexander Cherepanov




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