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

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 08:38, Michael J Gruber wrote:
>
> There are two issues here:
>
> - The package description says "additional hyphen patters" which
> everyone without packagers' knowledge will read as "installs additional
> hyphen patterns".

I'm not sure if description comes from TeX Live or from Fedora. If a
different description is needed for TeX Live packages, I can change
that.

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

Do you want to say that there are almost no legacy patterns with those
funny characters? That's pretty much intended. However the utf-8
patterns should be under tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/tex for
approximately 50 or 60 languages.

> 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.

I wasn't. (I'm not even part of Fedora team and I have never even
tried to use TeX Live from Fedora, to be honest.)

> 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).

The fact that there are only UTF-8 patterns in the tree doesn't mean
that you have to use an UTF-8 engine. Most patterns work just fine
with pdftex (of course sanskrit, ethiopic, indic patterns, lao, ...
won't, but that's a different story).

> 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.

I leave that up to the Fedora people for Fedora packages.

Maybe we should change descriptions in TL as well? But I'm not sure to
what exactly.

Mojca

To Karl: discussion started by Michael questioning whether the fact
that hyphenation packages are empty is ok or not (nobody expects empty
packages/packages with no files).