[efrench] Re: efrench package: distributions

[Raymond <raymond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1.
Some days before I received you e-mail, a user of e-french made a report concerning french.sty used with MikTeX 2.9. I found that MikTeX defines arabic as a language in language.dat. And french.sty (from package e-french) has a rapid switch mechanism to 
change the language. It defines \<language> to switch, in the case of arabic, \arabic and this was in conflict with the \arabic formatting of numbers.
I could correct this and now switching to Arabic is defined by \arabicLang. When some other language (in language.dat) would create a similar conflict, the switching should be \<language>Lang. This error affected french.sty and frenchle.sty.
2.
Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard made a big cleaning of our Subversion database, removing all unecessary old things we took from Bernard Gaulle. Following his idea, I made new packages. They are  lighter than the former ones and installing is easier.
3.
And in the same time, I tried to remove all false and old copyright. I hope, it's now OK.
4.
Today I started an upload for CTAN of the new packages.

Because in the future the \<language> (like \arabic) problem could arise with the former versions of french.sty and frenchle.sty, it would be good to declare the old versions (from June 28. 2007, by Bernard Gaulle : frenchpro and frenchle) as obsolete.

I think, I shall contact MikTeK (in German, for me easier than English, my first language is French) and suggest to consider also the e-french package and in the same time to take the corrected version of frenchle.sty.

Raymond Juillerat
for the e-french group

Le 2011-09-13 12:23, Robin Fairbairns a écrit :
> someone asked on http://tex.stackexchange.com/, yesterday, why efrench
> is not in the tex live distribution.
>
> i discussed the question with karl berry, who decides what's in and
> what's out of tex live.
>
> he pointed out that the distribution still includes
>
>    efrench/bases/inputs/copyrigh.tex
>
> which is presumably bernard's old licence statement for french(pro|le),
> and which muddies the water enough that tex live wouldn't hold the
> package.
>
> furthermore, it's not actually clear what an efrench bundle would
> contain, without exercising the package (something that neither i nor
> karl have the time, or enough fluency in french writing, to do).
>
> can you
> (a) sort out the licence situation -- things declaring that any part of
>      the bundle is non-free cause problems;
> (b) suggest some use cases that would make a comprehensive bundle widely
>      usable,
> or
> (c) tell us who might be able to help design a bundle.
>
> Robin Fairbairns
>
> For the CTAN team

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Projet eFrench - Pour une typographie informatique de langue française libre.