Re: Sizes of TL distribution

Am 20.01.26 um 11:32 schrieb Bruno Voisin via tex-live:
> This probably will never happen, too much work involved, and not really 
> in line with the open source philosophy, but still a dream. And, to be 
> fair, the TLC already provides most of what's needed, directing the user 
> to the relevant packages and describing their most useful commands.

well I think that dream is in line with open source philosophy, after 
all nothing prevents new packages from appearing or existing being used, 
but I agree with you that once in a while trimming the forest helps to 
actually grow it again. And this is precisely what is in parts happening 
with the tagging project as we need to do that kind of streamlining to 
make it work in the end. So packages vanish (or rather move in one way 
or the other into the kernel and the original will be emulated for 
backward compatibility). Last not least quite a number of package that 
have gone stale with no maintainer and bugs accumulating and it is 
difficult for ordinary users to understand that what was recommended in 
a post somewhere 10 year back may no longer be correct because the 
package didn't adapt (quite true for a lot of LLM advice too).

But I fear nothing in that direction really makes the distribution size 
much smaller, after all LaTeX is quite committed to to backward 
compatibility so even if, say, enumitem would no longer be necessary to 
load, one would still need something with that name for old documents or 
for those interfaces we decided not to provide, etc.

And then there are all the special packages, that are either totally 
niche or just yet another variant of the same scheme but dear to some 
people or used in old documents ...

However, yes with the TLCs we tried to provide a good foundation that 
gets the job done for many people and many tasks. And while I may have 
made the wrong judgement call in one or the other place I think on the 
whole it came out well, certainly TLC1 and 2 and TLC3 has to still prove 
itself a bit (but there I'm also fairly happy about the result).

So TLC3 as a scheme wouldn't be too bad an offer in my opinion (biased 
as I am).

frank