Re: Opinions sought on TeX Live packaging

[Ken Brown <kbrown at cornell dot edu>]

On 7/2/2012 5:29 AM, Andy Koppe wrote:
> On 30 June 2012 23:38, 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.
> >
> > 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.
>
> Out of curiosity: what makes the documentation that outragreously big?
> Is it provided in every format known to mankind?

Typically there's a pdf file, along with the tex source that was used to 
produce it.  Sometimes the manual is also given in html or info form. 
Most of the individual manuals are not huge, but some are pretty big, 
especially if they include graphics.  Now multiply that by 2000.  (There 
are actually about 2100 upstream packages that provide documentation; 
300 of them are already in the Cygwin distribution.)

Ken