[texhax] documentation for teTeX

[Karl Berry]

Hi Dan,

    how I accomodate my existing system to them.  

It is the first item in the "present" section of the TL documentation:
  http://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/livese11.html#x16-7000011.2

For another overview, see also:
  http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb25-1/hagen-tl.pdf

    For example, when is one supposed to use mktexdir?  

I don't think there is ever a need to use mktexdir directly from the
shell.  Is there?  It exists for some of the other subprograms to call.

    In addition, although the texlive documentation says how to install
    individual packages, 

It does, although I strongly advise simply installing them all, instead
of worrying about individual packages.

    I have never found where it says what the packages are and what they
    contain.  Is such documentation available?

That's a good question.  I'm not sure I have a good answer.  The
not-so-good answer is that there are descriptions in (some of the) tpm
files, which are located in the texmf*/tpm subdirectories.
I can't think of a convenient way to browse them, though.  It would be
easy enough to glom them together into some kind of HTML document,
preferably autoupdated from the info in the TeX Catalogue.  If anyone
wants to volunteer ...

And sometimes a high-level "package" exists in several tpm's, eg, for
bibtex there is:
  texmf-dist/tpm/bibtex.tpm
  texmf/tpm/bin-bibtex.tpm
  texmf/tpm/bin-bibtex8.tpm
  texmf/tpm/collection-bibtexextra.tpm
I can't think of any good way to collapse them.

Although not directly an answer, there's also doc.html, an autogenerated
list of all the package documentation files.  It's in the distribution
(top level), and here:
http://tug.org/ftp/texlive/Contents/live/doc.html

    I think that its production would be a good way on which to spend
    some of the annual dues.

Actually, essentially none of the technical efforts associated with TL
are directly supported by the user groups -- there isn't anywhere near
enough money to actually hire programmers, it's all volunteer.  The user
groups pay for production and mailing of the physical discs, some of the
backbone servers, etc., etc.

Anyway, I certainly agree that documentation improvements are always
a worthy goal ...

Best regards,
Karl