[tex-live] Should .tds.zip be encouraged?

[CTAN maintainer Jim Hefferon]

> http://tug.org/texlive/pkgcontrib.html

Dan, thank you for the reminder.  I wonder if that paragraph might have
slipped Karl's mind?

Your email prompted me that I should have noted that this has been a
fluid situation over the past year or so, where on-going experience with
holding materials in that format has changed the thinking.

To me, it is very influential that Karl and Christian assert that
experience shows that formatting the materials in this way does not help
them or their teams.   When people started uploading in this format, at
least I had thought it would.  So in terms of our service to the
distributions, .tds.zip has proved to not work.  
  
(In terms of internal-to-CTAN considerations, the great majority of our
uploaders are inexperienced-- unlike yourself or Lars, say.  I wrote a
checker to find typical problems and it essentially always flags the
contributions of first-timers.  So we spent a great deal of effort
trying to teach the Internet-- the TDS-guidelines.html document was
drafted for this purpose-- and in my opinion that's a job that has to
fail, particularly as it keeps us from doing other CTAN things that
would be improvements.)

I should note that the three of us CTAN-ers are of separate minds, so
these are just my thoughts.

Jim