Guide­lines for up­load­ing TDS-Pack­aged ma­te­ri­als to CTAN

Back­ground

Some au­thors like to pack­age their ma­te­ri­als in a .zip file that is ready to un­zip into a user's TeX tree. That is, in ad­di­tion to up­load­ing to CTAN in the tra­di­tional for­mat

    xxx.zip:
       +--xxx/
          +--README
          +--xxx.ins
          +--xxx.dtx
          +--xxx.pdf

an au­thor may send this.

    xxx.tds.zip:
       +--tex/
          +--latex/  
             +--xxx/
                +--xxx.sty
       +--doc/
          +--latex/
             +--xxx/
                +--README
                +--xxx.pdf
       +--source/
          +--latex/
             +--xxx/
                +--xxx.ins
                +--xxx.dtx

This lay­out fol­lows the TeX Direc­tory Stan­dard. We say that these ma­te­ri­als are TDS-pack­aged.

Note that, in most cases, the use­ful­ness of the .tds.zip is tran­si­tory: most mod­ern dis­tri­bu­tions pro­vide most (free) pack­ages, so that af­ter a day or so, a new (ver­sion of a) pack­age will be avail­able via the dis­tri­bu­tion's up­date mech­a­nism.

Ac­tion

Authors who do not wish to ex­per­i­ment should con­tinue what they are do­ing. We ask that au­thors wish­ing to try TDS pack­ag­ing do this.

• As usual, up­load a .zip or a .tar.gz bun­dle of your ma­te­rial. Lay the ma­te­rial out in the tra­di­tional way.
• In the top level of your bun­dle place the file <pkg id>.tds.zip that con­tains the TDS pack­ag­ing of your ma­te­ri­als. We will not in­stall this in the reg­u­lar brows­ing tree but in­stead will put it be­low the install/ sub­tree.

Ex­am­ple

For in­stance, an au­thor may send us xxx.zip with this lay­out.

   
    xxx.zip:
       xxx.tds.zip
       +--xxx/
          +--README
          +--xxx.ins
          +--xxx.dtx
          +--xxx.pdf

We in­stall into macros/latex/contrib/xxx the files README, xxx.ins, xxx.dtx, and xxx.pdf. We gen­er­ate a macros/latex/contrib/xxx.zip so archive vis­i­tors can down­load all these files at once. The xxx.tds.zip file which un­zips into the TDS lay­out shown ear­lier we put in install/macros/latex/contrib/xxx.tds.zip.