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Date:         Thu, 3 Jul 1997 12:35:21 +0100
From: Sebastian Rahtz <s.rahtz@ELSEVIER.CO.UK>
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Subject:      Re: Availability of Class files (was: LaTeX3 goals)
Status: R

 >  > It might make sense to include these classes as an official part of
 >  > latex, so the commercial distributions will include them as well.
 >
 > the problem with that is that it would directly bounce back to the
 > latex team in form of support questions so i think it can not be part
 > of core. but if we have such a collection it wouldn't be too difficult
 > to integrate it nevertheless into all major distributions.

the commercial/major distributions do not include all the contrib
packages on CTAN anyway. only TeX Live has them all (more or less) and
that is far too big for most people. So if Mark puts nyj.cls on CTAN, the
chance of it appearing in eg what Y&Y or Textures distribute is
vanishingly small.

ideally one would like a classification (such as TeX Live uses) to say
that a given package is one of `vital', `really useful', `sometimes useful',
`only for specialists'. All we have now is the `vital', eg the
packages in macros/latex/tools which They agree must be supported. But
how to agree on the rest? I have 0% interest in ever using nyj.cls
myself but for someone else it will be theeir daily tool.

 > is there anybody willing to work on such a collection? it would sure
 > help the LaTeX community a lot.

to some extent I have done it, in that I _have_ classified all the
LaTeX contrib packages on CTAN into 1, 2 or 3. if the LaTeX team
endorsed it, we could put pressure on all distributions to include the
class 1 and 2 stuff. clearly class 1 is the material that They
guarentee, class 2 would be the stuff that they dont support, but
which We consider widely useful. i see that i include in this category:

arseneau        cite            german          ntgclass        seminar
booktabs        cslatex         hyperref        patch           wasysym
calc            fancyheadings   jknappen        pslatex
caption         fancyvrb        ltxmisc         pspicture
carlisle        float           mathcomp        revtex
changebar       footnote        misc209         rotating

which as you can see is highly subjective....

Sebastian