On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 03:00:15PM -0300, George White wrote:

Quoting Heiko Oberdiek :

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On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 07:00:54AM -0300, George White wrote:

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Quoting Reinhard Kotucha :

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>>> "Karl" == Karl Berry writes:

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Well, if you can make a patch for the texdoc .dat file, I can install it :).

I fear that, unlike texdoctk, texdoc simply uses ls-R as a database.

Thomas recently mentioned that one can define aliases, but I think that it is best if the authors provide fixes.

It may be best, but is it practical? Will aliases help when you have dozens of manual.pdf files?

I suspect it is much easier to make changes in texdoc to support "package/manual". On systems that support symlinks one could process the doc tree to make package/manual.pdf -> package/package.pdf.

And how you want to solve the problem of several documentation files? One symlink can point to just *one* file.

Hopefully the others will at least be be mentioned in manual.pdf,

Perhaps somewhere, in many cases not: * Different language versions: manual-en.pdf, manual-de.pdf, ... The normal expectation is then, that the users that open manual-en.pdf see the English version, readers of manual-de.pdf the German version, ... It would be a surprise, if theses manual versions start with a list of links to the different language versions. And which language should be choosen for this part? * Separate source code documentation and user manual, articles, slides, ...

but this emphasizes the point that, for many packages, the directory in the doc tree is the real connection to the package and may contain multiple files with generic names like manual.pdf that may indicated the type of content but tell you nothing about the package.

But you still have the directory! The current texdoc behaviour is not appropriate for documentation that consist of several files: TDS:doc/.../package/package.pdf % for manual TDS:doc/.../package/package.pdf % for source code doc -> you are running out of names -> it is not clear, what the type of content is -> redundant naming, you could strip the directory "package" level A more naturally naming convention is: TDS:doc/.../package/manual.pdf TDS:doc/.../package/source.pdf Possible ways to solve the texdoc problem: * The package author offers a document for texdoc with standardized name (e.g. texdoc-index.[pdf,html,...] that contains explanations and links to the package's documentation. TDS:doc/.../packageA/texdoc-index.pdf TDS:doc/.../packageA/manual.pdf TDS:doc/.../packageA/source.pdf TDS:doc/.../packageB/texdoc-index.html TDS:doc/.../packageB/manual.html TDS:doc/.../packageB/README Then texdoc also looks for this document (texdoc-index.*). * Or a separate data base is maintained with package overviews. (e.g. source in XML. PDF and HTML are automatically generated.) source/packageA.xml source/packageB.xml pdf/packageA.pdf pdf/pacakgeB.pdf html/packageA.html html/packageB.html Then texdoc also looks for this database. * Or texdoc shows the directory and let the user decide, which file\ he wants. * ... Yours sincerely Heiko