[tex-live] datestamp in texcat

[Alexander Cherepanov]

Hi Norbert!
On Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:06:56 +0200, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:

>>     BTW when html tags are stripped all formatting is lost (paragraphs are 
>>     joined, line breaks are gone etc.). Are there any plans to improve 
>>     this?
>> 
>> Not on my side.  If you have any ideas about it, go for it.

> Keep in mind that the text is shown as is in tlmgr (GUI and tlmgr show),
> so as long as we don't have any formatting support there it wont help.

What do you think about preserving (some?) line breaks?

>> 2) Yes, it is useful: users who keep up to date don't end up downloading
>>    a package foo just because  a typo in the Catalogue was corrected.
>>    That was the original reason we implemented it the way we did.

> Of course one could with each catalogue change increase the revision
> number of the tlpsrc file and rebuild, 

Info from the catalogue in updated in master texlive.tlpdb without 
touching any revision number (except for texlive.tlpdb itself). But 
not in tlnet for some reason.

As it is right now info from the catalogue is the property of 
texlive.tlpdb and not of individual packages. Synchronizing its 
updates with updates of packages seems artificial.

Hm, maybe the idea was that updates to the catalogue are usually 
caused by package updates on ctan and blindly taking new info will get 
it out of sync with files in texlive repository. And when files are 
updated new info will finally be taken into tlnet texlive.tlpdb.
So it seems that main assumption was that corrections to a catalogue 
entry are rare and/or insignificant in comparison with updates of 
corresponding package. Reasonable enough.

> but as Karl said, only for 
> catalogue update to re-download huge packages is a waste of bandwidth,
> on both the user's as the server's side.

Agree here.

Thanks for responding.

Alexander Cherepanov