Re: Opinions sought on TeX Live packaging

["Yaakov (Cygwin/X)" <yselkowitz at users dot sourceforge dot net>]

On Sat, 2012-06-30 at 18:38 -0400, Ken Brown wrote:
> 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.

I had originally intended to do exactly as you propose, I just never got
around to it before I handed TeX Live over to you. 

> 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.

Of course, I'm sure you already understand that these can be completely
separate source packages and do not need to be subpackages of the
collections.

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

+1.


Yaakov