tex live 5, getting closer

[Sebastian Rahtz]

It is getting to the stage where interested parties will have to make
some important decisions, and do some real work, for TL5. I am
assuming that we are aiming at a new release in April 2000, which
means that development has to stop at the end of February to allow for 
testing.

There are five major areas to work on

 1. the texmf tree. we understand this, and I have been keeping it 
   more or less up to date. I am not seeing much real opposition to
   the idea that it should include only `free' packages.

 2. the categorisation of the texmf tree. while what we have is
   workable, it is fairly crude and would benefit from a major
   revision.

 3. the win32 install. despite Fabrice's heroic work with InstallShield 
   this year, it still is not right. Fabrice, can you estimate the
   work or time required to complete a new install? Ideally this would 
   also work under Unix, but thats a major job.

 4. the documentation. we have the proposal that TeX Live be divided
   into two: a) the CD itself, freely copyable, with expert's
   documentation, and b) the nice documentation for beginners. 

 5. Unix binary sets, and the teTeX++ source tree

Assuming that we very soon have a machine on which any interested
people have write access to the build tree, does anyone have views on
how to proceed?

In case it is not obvious, I should say that I do not have the time or
resources to work on much of this. Of the categories above, I do not
really expect to be able to devote any time to 3), 4) or 5). I regard
the integrity of 1) and 2) as my main concern. Importantly, it
leaves 5) out in the cold, since I have taken this on by myself in the
past. Specifically, does anyone want to take over total responsibility 
for this?

sebastian