Re: The Splitting of teTeX

["C.M. Connelly" <c@eskimo.com>]

"JG" == Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk>
"RK" == Richard Kaszeta <kaszeta@me.umn.edu>

   RK> In this case, I must disagree somewhat.  Having had personal
   RK> discussion with many of the authors, the reason they wanted
   RK> to require .dtx distribution along with the .sty is because
   RK> they wanted to ensure that end users have access to it for
   RK> documentation and example reasons.

Theoretically, the documentation is created during the build and
is part of the tetex-doc package.  It does seem like most (all?)
of the example files aren't included, however, which is a bad
thing.


   JG> No, it's not that I don't like the terms; I'm quite happy
   JG> with them.  But when you compare style files prepared with
   JG> docstrip to executable files written in C, you realise that
   JG> most of the time, people are only interested in the running
   JG> executable and any doc files that come with it, not in the
   JG> source code.  And for those who are interested in the
   JG> source code, there is the source package.  

   JG> There are very few packages where the source code itself is
   JG> of interest to the users of the programs: The Stanford
   JG> GraphBase (sgb and sgb-doc) is the only one I can think of
   JG> offhand.

I think it depends on how you use the packages -- if you take them
as they are and just use the facilities they provide without
modifying them, then no, there's no reason to look at the source
code.  Personally, though, I find myself looking at source code
all the time, either because I'm having some weird problem I want
to understand (or trying to help someone else with one) or because
I want to change the way some fundamental part of the system
works, and therefore need to look at the original code to see how
to make the changes.


   JG> So maybe we should, indeed, split tetex-src as well?

I think that the source stuff should probably be split.  At the
very least, there's no point in having the source files for, say,
tetex-latex-extra if you don't have the tetex-latex-extra package
installed.

   CMC

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   C.M. Connelly               c@eskimo.com                   SHC, DS
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