Or: The output of tlmgr --help is ridiculously long. Is there anything I can do about it?
I use TeX Live as my primary distribution and I often forget the exact commands that tlmgr uses. However, every time I call tlmgr --help I immediately regret, as it takes at least 30 seconds just to scroll through. The standard between modern CLI packages is that --help displays a short summary and everything else is either hidden under a subcommand (eg. install --help) or in man.
I would like to make a feature request about this, however I don't know how to start. I'm used to the modern FOSS development, where it is easy to reach the authors by filing an issue on GitHub or GitLab, and it is easy to submit and discuss a specific patch using Pull Requests. However, neither of these things seems to apply to TeX Live. They do have a GitHub mirror, but with Issues turned off, and the Pull Requests seem to be for technical fixes only. They have a self-hosted SVN, but I could not find an issue tracker.
I know they have a mailing list, but I don't think I want to join it, because I'm not really interested in updates and discussions about TeX Live in general, I just want to discuss this one feature.
Is there a way to contact the authors and talk about this feature request?
Best Answer
The official route to contact the TeX Live maintainers is the 'main' mailing list,
[email protected], which as noted in comments allows posts from non-subscribers. Other than some 'lost' users, who post general questions about (La)TeX to the list, the main volume is not too bad compared with some other places. As such, it's likely not too problematic to subscribe for the duration of a request: you are unlikely to get 100s of mails that way.