[tex-live] Organization of language collections

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Wed May 15 23:15:46 CEST 2013


Sorry, but I don't see what can be done.  No lumping and splitting can
please all users, as I've written before.

My general rationale for the change is that I thought users should be
given choices that mean something.  IMHO, the splitting into a dozen or
two languages that has been in place "forever" was useless overkill
.. nowadays.

In the early years of TeX, it was not possible to load patterns for many
languages simultaneously.  This is what led to the multiplicity of
language collections.  That was overcome long ago.  Therefore, there is
no longer any reason to present so many choices.  Better to simplify the
installation.

As for the documentation, I chose the collections to make packages of
some reasonable size where possible, rather than a ton of tiny ones.
Here again, even though hyphenation and documentation are obviously
different things, I saw no good reason for doubling the number of lang
packages (defeating the overall goal) merely to allow the distinction at
install time.

    My preferred organization would be into three collections for
    each language (or group of languages):

So, you preferred the old organization.  Sorry again.
Not going to revert.

If you insist on it, of course it's possible: after the original
installation, you can install the hyph packages you want, or you can
install everything and then remove the unreadable documentation
packages.  Either way.

Best,
karl


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