Bug#105830: texdoc should make all Debian TeX documentation available
Package: tetex-bin
Version: 1.0.7+20001218-4
Severity: wishlist
TeTeX's texdoc program in tetex-bin and its TCL front end in the package
tktexdoc are useful programs, but their usefulness is severely compromised by
working only on documentation included with teTeX. TeTeX (the web2c
underneath, actually) is designed to function well as the core of a larger TeX
installation, for example a full Debian TeX installation that includes other
TeX packages besides teTeX. So the suggestion to make texdoc aware of all
Debian TeX documentation is not a misuse of texdoc.
Let me take the Debian bibtool package as an example. It is very inconvenient
that "texdoc bibtool" (or perusing the menus of tktexdoc) does not give me
bibtool's documentation, which is available on my system. I have to go look in
/usr/share/doc/bibtool to find that, and before that, I have to type dpkg -S
bibtool to find out where to look. A naive user has no reason to distinguish
between programs in teTeX proper and those outside it. An experienced user or
developer wants to use his brain to store more relevant information.
I have one suggestion on how to accomplish it, but I am by no means an expert
on Debian development, so there may be better solutions. If each TeX-related
package self-identified or registered its documentation files somehow, these
files could be linked into a directory indexed by texdoc, i.e., referenced by
the default value of $TEXDOCS in teTeX's texmf.cnf. I imagine this would be
done by having the .postinst of each TeX package invoke a common script to
which it provides a list of documentation files.
In the Debian tradition, such a facility for registration could even be
independent of its intended first application to texdoc, by which I mean the
tetex-doc package itself would register, with the idea that one day perhaps
some other program besides texdoc would take advantage of the list of Debian
TeX documentation files to provide convenienet user access to them.
I've made this suggestion sound complicated because I have described it
abstractly, but following it might be as simple as having each TeX package call
the following script its postinst while sending a space-separated list of files
on stdin (though some complementary action would need to be taken in .postrm):
register-dox /usr/share/doc/pkg/foo.dvi /usr/share/doc/pkg/bar.dvi
... register-dox is:
#!/bin/sh
tetex-doc-dir=/usr/doc/texmf/alien-to-tetex
mkdir -p $tetex-doc-dir
for f; do
fn=$(echo $f | tr / _) # uniquify the filename
ln -s $f $tetex-doc-dir/$fn
done
texhash # or, better, use install-lsr in the loop
The corresponding action in .postrm (or wherever) would be something like:
rm $tetex-doc-dir/_usr_share_doc_pkg_*
texhash
-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux beth 2.4.2 #1 Fri Apr 6 10:19:26 EDT 2001 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
Versions of packages tetex-bin depends on:
ii debianutils 1.15 Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii dpkg 1.9.6 Package maintenance system for Deb
ii ed 0.2-19 The classic unix line editor
ii libc6 2.2.3-5 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libkpathsea3 1.0.7+20001218-4 shared libkpathsea for teTeX
ii libpng2 1.0.11-1 PNG library - runtime
ii libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 1:2.95.4-0.010424 The GNU stdc++ library
ii libtiff3g 3.5.5-4 Tag Image File Format library
ii libwww0 5.3.2-5 The W3C-WWW library.
ii libxaw7 4.0.3-4 X Athena widget set library
ii perl-base [perl5-base] 5.6.1-5 The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbis
ii tetex-base 1.0.2+20000804-8 basic teTeX library files
ii xlibs 4.0.3-4 X Window System client libraries
ii zlib1g 1:1.1.3-15 compression library - runtime
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