[texdoc] texdoc dtk

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2011-05-12 at 07:59:57 +0200, Arno Trautmann wrote:

 > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > >  > the call of
 > >  > 
 > >  > texdoc dtk
 > >  > 
 > >  > results in
 > >  > 
 > >  > /texmf-dist/doc/generic/pst-optic/more_docs/dtk.pdf
 > >  > 
 > >  > which is surely not what one is looking for, but rather result
 > >  > number 2 from texdoc -s dtk:
 > >  > 
 > >  > /texmf-dist/doc/latex/dtk/doc/beispiel.pdf
 > >  > 
 > >  > Would be great if this could be fixed,
 > > 
 > > You got what you asked for.  Run
 > 
 > No, I asked for the TeXnical documentation of the class dtk.
 > 
 > >   texdoc beispiel
 > > 
 > > if you want that.
 > 
 > If I know it was called that, I would have used a locate and didn't
 > need texdoc.

What's the output of

  texdoc -l -M dtk | wc -l

and 

  locate dtk | wc -l

?  I don't think locate is an option.


 > > I don't know why people upload stuff to CTAN which breaks texdoc
 > > deliberately again and again.
 > 
 > There you're right É it should be dtk.pdf or dtk-doc.pdf maybe.

I think "beispiel.pdf" is even more problematic because its name
implies that it's an example file and not the documentation of a
package.  If texdoc would understand German, I suppose it would assign
a lower score when sorting files by relevance.

 > > texdoc tries to be smart.  IMO this is inherently wrong.  It
 > > invites people to put crap on CTAN and prevents correct stuff to
 > > work properly.
 > 
 > Well, that's beyond my scope; I just want to get the documentation
 > É for me as user it doesn't matter where it comes from, how it is
 > called etc É

Yes, people don't want to know.  But everybody knows that the new
texdoc has an alias table and that there is someone who can fix
problems.

texdoc tries to find files by an algorithm.  Files which can't be
found this way need an entry in the alias table.  But I fear that if
the alias table is growing too much, it becomes as unmaintainable as
texdoctk's database.  So it would be nice if package authors think a
little bit about what *they* can do that their files are found.

 > > You asked for "dtk" and got "dtk.pdf".  Be happy.  When I run
 > 
 > Is this the intended behaviour of texdoc, just to replace a locate
 > command? Then it's not a very usefull tool, I guess?

I don't compare it with locate, which IMO isn't very useful at all.  I
compare it with the old shell script which didn't always find the
correct files, but was very useful though.  The difference is that
formerly you had to ask the package authors if a file wasn't found,
now you ask here to treat files with unfortunate names as exceptions,
and the package authors don't care.

Isn't it annoying that you have to ask here whenever a new package
appears in TeX Live?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                              mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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