Re: The Splitting of teTeX
On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 08:54:54AM -0500, Richard Kaszeta wrote:
> >Absolutely! tetex-src is a fairly pointless package to have available
> >in .deb form. A source package for it, or even just a .tar.gz or
> >.tar.bz2 version would be more than adequate. Since it is only used
> >upstream to generate tetex-{base,extra}, it really is like a source
> >package. As I said, it only exists because of certain licensing
> >requirements. So the effort needed to split it would be wasted.
>
> In this case, I must disagree somewhat. Having had personal
> discussion with many of the authors, the reason they wanted to require
> .dtx distribution along with the .sty is because they wanted to ensure
> that end users have access to it for documentation and example
> reasons.
>
> It's *not* only a source package---the author *wanted* to have that
> .dtx in the hands of the end-user, installed on the systems.
OK, I retract my comments. Then there is going to be a fair amount of
work needed to split the package.
> Remember, "only exists because of certain licensing requirements" is
> still important. If you don't like their terms, stop distributing
> their software.
No, it's not that I don't like the terms; I'm quite happy with them.
But when you compare style files prepared with docstrip to executable
files written in C, you realise that most of the time, people are only
interested in the running executable and any doc files that come with
it, not in the source code. And for those who are interested in the
source code, there is the source package. There are very few packages
where the source code itself is of interest to the users of the
programs: The Stanford GraphBase (sgb and sgb-doc) is the only one I
can think of offhand. For the .dtx files, I recall that Thomas
worked very hard to ensure that all of the documentation is in the
main tetex-texmf tree, and that only the .dtx files and drivers that
go with it are left in tetex-src.
So maybe we should, indeed, split tetex-src as well?
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
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