done with texmf -> texmf-dist merge, now the real work can start

git-svn-id: svn://tug.org/texlive/trunk@29724 c570f23f-e606-0410-a88d-b1316a301751

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 11 deletions

diff --git a/Master/texmf-dist/README b/Master/texmf-dist/README
index 912ad4954dd..27a48ef04e7 100644
--- a/Master/texmf-dist/README
+++ b/Master/texmf-dist/README
@@ -1,15 +1,18 @@
-Copyright 2004, 2007 TeX Users Group.
+Copyright 2004, 2007, 2013 TeX Users Group.
 You may freely use, modify and/or distribute this file.
 
-This tree (texmf-dist) is for the formats (plain, LaTeX, ConTeXt, and
-all the rest) and all the packages, together with their documentation
-and sources.  Most everything used in day-to-day TeXing, except the
-binaries themselves.
+This tree (texmf-dist) contains the packages and their documentation and
+support files which are distributed by TeX Live.
 
-Another criteria: everything that can be classified automatically by
-Fabrice's tpm-factory goes in texmf-dist (or texmf-doc).  If not, it
-goes in texmf.
+The binaries and TL infrastructure files themselves are in separate
+directories (bin/ and tlpkg/ respectively), but just about everything
+else we distribute is here.  Files generated during installation or use
+are in separate texmf-config and texmf-var.
+
+TeX Live started with just one tree (named texmf); over time, it was
+split into other trees (texmf-dist, texmf-doc) for reasons that seemed
+good at the time, but as of TeX Live 2013, it seemed simplest to once
+again have only one main tree.  We kept the name texmf-dist instead of
+going back to texmf since the "-dist" explicitly signals that it is the
+files that are distributed.
 
-And yet another: texmf-dist should be distribution-independent, so that,
-in theory, it could be used by distributions other than TeX Live.  So,
-no web2c/kpathsea-specific files.