Collections and packages

[Bob Tennent]

Hi Karl.
I realize that complete reference documentation for tlmgr will be massive,
but massive *and* unstructured is not good. By "structure" I mean sections
and sub-sections with headings, table of contents, index, separation of
basic and essential material from advanced or rarely-used actions/options,
etc.
Okay, I can see that it wouldn't be feasible to replace the current
documentation format and I'm certainly not the person who is
going to try and make it better.  But does a "preamble" that summarizes the
most useful  actions and options have to be in pod format?

Bob

On Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 5:53 PM Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:

> Hi Bob,
>
>    massive,
>
> There's a lot of functionality.
>
>     unstructured
>
> Well, there are many sections and lists, so it's not exactly completely
> unstructured.
>
>     and, frankly, unusable
>
> I know what you mean, but, there's the information.
>
>     man page which typesets to no less than 26 pages.
>
> There's a lot of functionality. It's not going to get shorter.
>
>     I propose to LaTeX-ify tlmgr.1.  Would that be acceptable?
>
> No. It would be unmaintainable. Sorry.
>
> Right now, tlmgr.1 and tlmgr.html are generated from the pod
> documentation that is at the end of tlmgr.pl.
>
> There is also a program pod2latex (standard with Perl) which generates
> LaTeX source meant to be included in a document.  If you can devise a
> preamble for it (there is that makes you happier than the current man
> page pdf, we can distribute that. If there are changes to the pod that
> would make it better, that's fine too. (Doc for pod itself is at, e.g.,
> https://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html. It is not complicated.)
>
> But the pod has to remain the ultimate source. --thanks, karl.
>
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