[Tex/LaTex] How to a package be listed on CTAN but not be available in Tex Live

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Here is a comment by Alan Munn on How soon do all CTAN mirrors update for TeX Live Utility to detect the changes?

Except for during [the freeze period], (i.e., most of the time) TeXLive updates to packages (not binaries) are available within a day or so of them being uploaded to CTAN.

I submitted my very first package to CTAN earlier this year and my submission was successful: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/matlab-prettifier. I last updated the package in late April 2014.

However, to this day, I have never seen my package listed as part of Tex Live 2013: the TeX Live Utility (I'm on Mac OS X) has never listed it under the "Packages" tab. I've now installed and switched to Tex Live 2014, but my package is not listed in there either.

Before I bother CTAN or TeX Live people, I'd like your thoughts on this. Does the absence of my package in Tex Live 2014 have to do with the annual freeze period? What am I doing wrong? Under what circumstances can a package be listed on the CTAN site but not be available in Tex Live?

Update: matlab-prettifier is now available in TeX Live 2014.

Best Answer

The conditions of a package for TeX Live can be found at this page: TeX Live package contributions

I will quote some of the page to discuss the conditions.

Disclaimer: I am not part of the TeX Live team. This is just my way to see the licensing conditions and my interpretation might not be correct.

Questions can be asked in the TeX Live mailing list (texlive at tug dot org), see TeX Live mailing lists.

1. a) First, the package must be free (as in freedom) software, available under, for example, the LaTeX Project Public License or GNU General Public License. Please state the license explicitly in your package's source code, README, and/or other documentation. Those licenses (and others) contain instructions for how to apply them to your code.

matlab-prettifier is licensed under LPPL 1.3 or any later version.

2. a) The package must be useful in itself, or useful in conjunction with free software. In other words, we won't install a package that exists only to support something nonfree, even when it is free itself (e.g., LPPL'd macro support for a proprietary font). That doesn't help the free software world, and would rightly be rejected by free distros in any case.

Problem Problematic, because MATLAB is AFAIK a commercial software and the sole purpose of matlab-prettifier is the MATLAB language.

TeX Live has the condition, that a package must be useful on a system, which consists and uses entirely free software. This condition differs TeX Live from MiKTeX. It is a concise decision of the Maintainers of TeX Live, which do not want to spend their spare voluntary time on commercial software.

However, it is acceptable for TeX Live AFAIK, if a package is additionally useful for free software. There are some free alternatives to MATLAB: GNU Octave, FreeLab, ... If at least some of them also support the MATLAB language (more or less), or if the package can also support free alternatives, then the red cross might turn to a green check mark.

2. b) We very strongly recommend using an existing license; devising your own will certainly delay any inclusion in TeX Live. We also strongly recommend using a clause “or any later version” with any license. The licensing conditions for TeX Live go into more detail about what is and isn't acceptable.

LPPL 1.3 or any later version.

3. The source for any generated documentation files (e.g., pdf) must also be available for the generated documentation to be included in TeX Live. We won't refuse to install the package itself, but we must refrain from installing generated documentation when there is no source. Free documentation is as important as free software.

Source for the package and documentation is given by the .dtx file.

4. If you haven't uploaded your package to CTAN, please do that. Virtually all TL packages come from CTAN and that is by far the easiest place for us to update from. It's a good thing in general for CTAN to be as comprehensive as possible.

CTAN location: CTAN:macros/latex/contrib/matlab-prettifier/

5. The @ character cannot be used in any filenames. Our tools are not prepared to handle this, and since it's trivial to avoid we'd rather not spend time on it.

matlab-prettifier does not contain @. The use of - is ok.

6. The package should not create (the likelihood of) any new runtime filename conflicts; in other words, all names should be reasonably expected to remain unique; using the package name as a prefix often works well. In addition to conflicts in the TeX tree, new executables should have names that are reasonably distinctive, and not just within the TeX world—most executables will end up being installed in system-wide directories as part of os distributions.

The only run-time file matlab-prettifier.sty does not conflict with any other file in TeX Live.

Summary:

Most conditions pass without doubt.
In case of 2.a), I would ask on the TeX Live mailing list. It would help, if the package can show its usefulness for free software.
The package might just be overlooked, also a reason to ask on the TeX Live mailing list.

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[Tex/LaTex] Updating packages while TeX Live is frozen

Simpler than installing from CTAN is the following procedure: * download all file *.tar.xz from the tlpretest/archive * try to run tlmgr install --from-file *.tar.xz

That should work in most cases, but has the problem that the doc and source files (in the -doc.tar.xz and -source.tar.xz) are installed as separate packages (AFAIR).

Still you should get updated versions of the packages.

And no, don't do this with binary packages, especially not on Windows (library hell).

[Tex/LaTex] TeX Live package collection organisation

The confusion here arises from a complete overload of the word package, which can refer to many different things here. Let us try to distinguish most of these packages a bit more, beginning from the smallest unit.

Style file: \usepackage{aaa} This is used in LaTeX source code and references one particular .sty file that will be loaded.
CTAN package: These are sets of files developed by the same person or group, sometimes containing only one .sty file, sometimes containing many of them and other files (fonts, metrics, data, ...).
TeX Live package: This is what you can install in TeX Live with tlmgr that is not called collection-* or scheme-*. These are usually the same as the CTAN packages, with very few exceptions.
TeX Live collections: These are groups of TeX Live packages / CTAN packages. The packages are roughly ordered by use and relevance.
Distribution packages: Distributions (like Debian, RedHat, and SuSE) often repackage the TeX Live distribution into their own format and units. Debian creates one Debian package for each collection in TeX Live. Other distributions do it differently.

You asked what are the official places to check. That is not easy:

Style files: There is no easy way, since there are too many of them, and many are not used directly with \usepackage. The only way is to check the list of files available. In TeX Live you can do that with tlmgr search --file .sty, which will give you a long list of CTAN/TeX Live package names and contained style files (BTW, currently 4509 files).
CTAN package: CTAN itself has extensive search and browsing options.
TeX Live package: The authoritative source of packages in TeX Live is best found in the list of tlpsrc files in the subversion repository. However, this will not help you much, because there are no descriptions or files contained. You can again use tlmgr info which will list all packages, including whether they are installed or not, and the short description. You also mentioned http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/tlpkg/texlive.tlpdb, which is definitely fine and readable, but tlmgr might be more comfortable to query this data.
TeX Live collections: see above, or use tlmgr info collections
Distribution packages: every distribution has its own info pages

To go through your example of lm versus lmodern.sty, you could do the following.

Use tlmgr to find which package provides lmodern.sty:

$ tlmgr search --file lmodern.sty
lm:
      texmf-dist/tex/latex/lm/lmodern.sty

Then use tlmgr info to get more details:

tlmgr info lm
package:     lm
category:    Package
shortdesc:   Latin modern fonts in outline formats
longdesc:    The Latin Modern family of fonts consists of 72 text fonts and 20 mathematics fonts, and is based on the Computer Modern fonts released into public domain by AMS (copyright (c) 1997 AMS). The lm font set contains a lot of additional characters, mainly accented ones, but not exclusively. There is one set of fonts, available both in Adobe Type 1 format (*.pfb) and in OpenType format (*.otf). There are five sets of TeX Font Metric files, corresponding to: Cork encoding (cork-*.tfm); QX encoding (qx- *.tfm); TeX'n'ANSI aka LY1 encoding (texnansi-*.tfm); T5 (Vietnamese) encoding (t5-*.tfm); and Text Companion for EC fonts aka TS1 (ts1-*.tfm).
installed:   Yes
revision:    28119
sizes:       src: 4817k, doc: 2629k, run: 42581k
relocatable: No
cat-version: 2.004
cat-date:    2015-08-03 05:43:12 +0200
cat-license: gfsl
cat-topics:  font font-proportional font-mono font-type1 font-otf font-cm
collection:  collection-fontsrecommended

If you want to see all files contained in lm, just add --list to the above invocation and it will give you all contained files.

Finally, you can also browse the lm package by going to https://ctan.org/pkg/lm, where you can confirm that the respective TeX Live package name is lm ("Contained in TEX Live as lm").

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