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Date:         Wed, 7 Jun 2006 14:01:49 +0200
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From: Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek@UNI-FREIBURG.DE>
Subject: Re: LaTeX Release 2005/12/01
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <DA0C2AB63368174EBC9D463D81F63E946830E8@derum207.emea.corp.eds.com>
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Status: R

Hello,

my question was:

>     Regarding babel, I don't understand, why some TeX distributions put
>     *all* files below TDS/*/generic/, from my readme.txt:

--> TDS compliance would sort them in latex and generic.


Karl answered:

> There is no deep reason behind it for TL -- the ctan2tds.pl kind of steers
> one in the direction of choosing a single format (latex/generic/whatever)
> for a package.  Exceptions take more code. Can't say why for teTeX and
> vtex.

--> Maintenance favours generic.


> I agree that it would be better to use tex/latex/babel and
> tex/generic/babel as appropriate.

--> TDS compliance

> When it is time to update TL, I hope to use your bundles and then
> everything will be better.

TDS implies a search strategy where "latex" would look first
in all TDS:tex/latex// subtrees, then TDS:tex/generic//. When
several TDS trees are used where the same file is installed
in different format sub trees, we can have the problem that
a package with several files loads the files from different
versions.

--> A kind of compatibility problem.

On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 09:00:34AM +0200, Mittelbach, Frank wrote:

> from a practical point of view I personally prefer to have all production
> files for one type of task in one directory rather than in 2 and not find,
> say babel.def in generic but babel.sty in latex, but I guess there are
> arguments for both

--> practical point/maintenanace for generic

Thus full TDS compliance would have costs in maintenance and
compatibility problems and therefore I don't change
the current location of babel in generic.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek@uni-freiburg.de>