[Fedora TeX Live] texlive-hyphen-english contains no files

[Michael J Gruber]

Mojca Miklavec venit, vidit, dixit 11.12.2011 22:07:
> On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 20:44, Michael J Gruber
> <michaeljgruber+gmane at fastmail.fm> wrote:
>> rpm -qil texlive-hyphen-english
>> Name        : texlive-hyphen-english
>> Version     : 2011
>> Release     : 4.svn23092.fc16
>> Architecture: noarch
>> Install Date: Sun Dec 11 20:39:28 2011
>> Group       : Unspecified
>> Size        : 0
>> License     : LPPL
>> Signature   : (none)
>> Source RPM  : texlive-hyphen-english-2011-4.svn23092.fc16.src.rpm
>> Build Date  : Wed Dec  7 10:01:36 2011
>> Build Host  : dhcp-31-95.brq.redhat.com
>> Relocations : (not relocatable)
>> Summary     : English hyphenation patterns
>> Description :
>> Additional hyphenation patterns for American and British
>> English in ASCII encoding.  The American English patterns
>> (usenglishmax) greatly extend the standard patterns from Knuth
>> to find many additional hyphenation points.  British English
>> hyphenation is completely different from US English, so has its
>> own set of patterns.
>> (contains no files)
>>
>> Which is quite different from tl-hyphen-german,
> 
> But only german, russian and a very very very few other exceptions.
> All other packages for other languages are empty and that it to be
> expected.
> 
>> say. I'd expect at least
>> ukhyphen.def to come in.
> 
> I wouldn't. UK is the language code for Ukrainian.

I have a ukhyphen.def lying around which is british english, but this
may be from very old sources.

>> But:
>> ls /usr/share/texlive/texmf/tex/generic/hyphen/
>>
>> dehyphn.tex  dehyphtex.tex  dehypht.tex  dumyhyph.tex  ghyphen.README
>> hyphen.tex  hypht1.tex  zerohyph.tex
>>
>> What is going on?
> 
> The package should just enable hyphenation patterns that are otherwise
> part of hyph-utf8.
> 
> It was not practical to split hyph-utf8 into zillions of packages (the
> package is only a few MB), while being able not to include some
> languages means smaller footprint of TeX formats and possibly faster
> processing of documents (most users don't need 50 different
> languages).

There are two issues here:

- The package description says "additional hyphen patters" which
everyone without packagers' knowledge will read as "installs additional
hyphen patterns".

- There are (almost?) no (standard, non-utf8) hyphenation pattern files
in the standard tree, even though I have texlive-hyph-utf8.

Note that I'm not complaining, but trying to make fedora's texlive
better for the average user. So there's no need to be in defensive mode.

>From texlive-hyph-utf8's info I get the impression that the usual
hyphenation patterns do not get installed at all any more, that is:
everyone's supposed to use the prebuilt fmt files (or use a utf8 engine).

That's fine, but maybe the "zillion" (less than 60) packages which
merely activate a set of patterns in a prebuilt fmt would benefit from
an explanatory note.

Michael