Opinions sought on TeX Live packaging

Ken Brown kbrown@cornell.edu
Sat Jun 30 22:39:00 GMT 2012


TeX Live upstream has thousands of packages, grouped into "collections". 
  Cygwin's TeX Live distribution, as originally packaged by Yaakov, has 
one texlive-collection-* package for each upstream collection.  I've 
just discovered that about 1800 of the upstream packages, falling into 
about 40 collections, have documentation that is currently not included 
in the Cygwin packages.  I don't know if this was on oversight on 
Yaakov's part or a deliberate decision to omit most of the documentation.

In any case, I think that the documentation is an integral part of TeX 
Live and needs to be part of the Cygwin distribution.  If I simply add 
it to the texlive-collection-* packages, however, some of them 
drastically increase in size.  For example, the installation tarball for 
texlive-collection-latex would increase from about 1MB to about 40MB. 
And for texlive-collection-latexextra it would increase from under 10MB 
to over 300MB.

My inclination is to create new texlive-collection-*-doc packages, at 
least for the most commonly used collections and/or for the collections 
that have a lot of documentation.  Ubuntu appears to do something like 
this.  http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=texlive shows the 
following documentation packages:

   texlive-base-bin-doc
   texlive-fonts-extra-doc
   texlive-fonts-recommended-doc
   texlive-humanities-doc
   texlive-latex-base-doc
   texlive-latex-extra-doc
   texlive-latex-recommended-doc
   texlive-metapost-doc
   texlive-pictures-doc
   texlive-pstricks-doc
   texlive-publishers-doc

Before going ahead with this, I'd like to know if people think it's a 
good idea.

Ken



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