[tex-live] teTeX: no next release

[Karl Berry]

    it would be nice if authors could even manage to produce packages that
    had some standard installation interface.

Well, it would be nice if there was a standard installation interface to
which authors could conform :).  (Although TL uses a `texlive:' target
in a Makefile if it exists, that's too much to ask of most authors and
shouldn't be necessary for most packages anyway.)

I've been thinking about that a little as I've struggled through adding
more and more special cases as I've been updating packages lately.  What
would be useful for me, and perhaps more palatable for authors, is a
file which says to which TDS directory each file (or directory) in their
package should be copied.  Something like:

foo.sty > tex/latex/foo/foo.sty
foo.dtx > source/latex/foo/foo.dtx

Plenty of variations and syntax and bells and whistles would need to be
worked out, of course, probably something to say which dtx file to run,
etc., etc.  All the stuff that is hardcoded in the TL scripts now,
in principle.

This is already what many authors are writing out in English in their
READMEs, so it wouldn't be much work for them to make a machine-readable
file out of it.  Most of our special cases are because (say) foo.tex
should be installed in package X, but is a doc file in package Y.  It
would be nice not to have determine this by guesswork on my part, which
is what it comes down to now.

At least something like this would be a step forward toward being able
to install direct from CTAN.

Reactions?

karl