[Fedora-packaging] tex/latex doc install location

[Jindrich Novy]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 07:15:30PM +0000, Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
> On 21/01/2008, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> > One thing I'd like to ask about from the original post::
> >    In tex/latex bundled in fedora (I guess it comes from tetex and it is
> >    now in texlive) there is a simple system to view documentation.
> >
> > What is this "simple system"?  We do have a rule that nothing marked as
> > %doc should break an application if it is not present on the system.  If
> > this help system is integrated into applications (like ghelp for gnome)
> > then this would count under that rule.  If it's more like man and info
> > pages then we'd want them to be marked as doc even if they are located
> > somewhere other than %{_docdir}.
> 
> In theory, to get documentation on any tex package, you type "texdoc
> <package>". The system then looks in texmf/tex/doc/ for
> <package>.{pdf,html,ps,dvi,...} and loads it in the appropriate
> viewer.
> 
> This doesn't always work, for example with packages whose
> documentation isn't named after the package, but that's the theory.
> More information at http://linux.die.net/man/1/texdoc or
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/texdoc.html
> 

There are two tools for browsing documentation actually, texdoc and
texdoctk. The both are now packaged in texlive-doc subpackage. The
texdoctk provides a nice GUI where one can navigate to a particular
part of docs.

If we want to move docs anywhere else than to $TEXMFMAIN/doc, we need
to rework texdoctk a bit as it expects in its configuration file
(texdocrc.defaults) a path to documentation relative to the main texmf
tree. It's not worth the effort IMO, as $TEXMFMAIN/doc has always been
a directory where to put documentation so more things could break if we
change that.

Jindrich

-- 
Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com>   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/