where to make packaging suggestions? the monstrosity that is "xmlto"

[Robert P. J. Day]

  in the process of setting up my 10.04 box for
typesetting/publishing, and went to install the "xmlto" package --
sadly, it insists on dragging in dozens and dozens of "tex"-related
packages and requiring 757MB of extra disk space.  so, a thought or
two.

  1) given that people might want to use "xmlto" for generating
simple HTML, it's not clear that every xmlto user needs all that
tex-related crap.  can it be repackaged to make all of that only
*suggested*?

  2) given that FOP is now a viable (if still incomplete) XML to PDF
translator, that argues even more strongly for making tex stuff
optional, since FOP might -- for many people -- be perfectly adequate.

  is this a reasonable suggestion to make to the appropriate parties?

rday

p.s.  strictly from a personal perspective, but i think a typesetting
kind of ubuntu task would be useful.  perhaps "desktop publishing",
which would represent stuff like xmlto, docbook-related packages,
scribus, etc.  is that worth suggesting?  more generally, is ubuntu
open to the introduction of new, well-defined tasks for
/usr/share/tasksel/ubuntu-tasks.desc?

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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