On 2014-02-05 at 18:07:03 +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote: > Who is responsible for this program? Neither --version nor --help > gives any contact (which is also a bug IMHO).
Hi Werner, the answer to this question might be interesting to others too, so I'll try to answer it more generally. The easiest way to find out who is responsible for a particular package is to look at http://ctan.org and use the search facilities. CTAN provides data from the TeX Catalogue, unfortunately except email addresses. The advantage of CTAN is that it mentiones the *current* maintainer(s). If someone encounters a problem with an older release it's not helpful to contact inactive maintainers. Since the CTAN team rejects everything which isn't accompanied with a clear license statement for more than a decade, we can assume that one of the files listed by texdoc -l <package name> contains the information you are looking for. There might be other ways to find out who's responsible for a particular package but IMO CTAN is the best choice. Just because it's up-to-date with regard to *current* maintainers. It's a pity that email addresses are not provided by CTAN. They still exist in the Catalogue XML database. Robin told me that they are not exposed to the internet anymore because someone (obviously a troll) complained. IMO it's ridiculous but legal aspects can't be ignored. A possible solution could be to extend the CTAN upload interface by a button which allows package authors to confirm that they agree that their email address is exposed to the web. I'm sure that $\infty - 1$ authors agree. Another solution could be to expose email addresses unconditionally if they appear in at least one of the uploaded files. It shouldn't be too difficult to look for email addresses with grep -r. With pdftotext even the content of PDF files can be passed to grep. I'm not a lawyer but I suppose that legal problems can only arise if, and only if, the files in a particular package don't contain any email address. It's amazing to see what a single troll can destroy. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-3373112 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
