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In-Reply-To:  Your message of "Fri, 13 Nov 1998 08:18:14 +1000." 
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Date:         Fri, 13 Nov 1998 09:07:47 +0000
From: Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns@CL.CAM.AC.UK>
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To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L
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Subject:      Re: What is "base" LaTeX
Status: R

ken smith (in response to philip helbig's suggestion that `supported'
stuff should go into the `core' of latex) wrote:

> Would someone like to estimate how large this would make the core?
> I have in mind people installing from scratch on a new machine.

the problem, as i see it, is that nobody knows what of the stuff in
latex is supported and what isn't.  the fact that things are in
contrib/supported is no real indication at all -- people ask for their
stuff to go there, and then disappear (for example, the author of
booktabs, an excellent package, is uncontactable), people put stuff
there and with the idea in mind that it's straightforward enough that
anyone could maintain it, and so on.  and all that's apart from the
situation where people put stuff in `other' since they can't be
bothered to package it up in a way that makes sense for the
`supported' tree's directory-per-submission arrangement.

if _i_ don't know what is the state of what we have on ctan, who does?
the best we can do is the sort of thing sebastian does with live --
provide a sort of gradation.  damned difficult to achieve, imho
(sebastian does a good job, but it's not perfect).

r