[texdoc] texdoc dtk

[Arno Trautmann]

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 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.

locate dtk | grep texlive | grep pdf

gives a quite good result. But of course you're right.

>  > > 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.

Right, again.

>  > > 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.

I didn't know. I just knew that it did not what I expected it to. So I
wrote to the texdoc-list. I did neither know who maintains it nor how it
works nor who should fix this at which end.

> 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.

Ok, so the package author is Òto blameÓ.

>  > > 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?

I wish I hadn't to, yes.

cheers
Arno

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