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Contributing a file to the archives

You have something to submit to the archive — great! Before we even start, here’s a check-list of things to sort out:

1. Licence: in the spirit of TeX, we hope for free software; in the spirit of today’s lawyer-enthralled society, CTAN provides a list of “standard” licence statements.
2. Documentation: it’s good for users to be able to browse documentation before downloading a package. You need at least a plain text README file (exactly that name); in addition a PDF file of the package documentation, prepared for screen reading, is highly desirable.
3. Name: endless confusion is caused by name clashes. If your package has the same name as one already on CTAN, or if your package installation generates files of the same name as something in a “normal” distribution, the CTAN team will delay installation while they check that you’re doing the right thing: they may nag you to change the name, or to negotiate a take-over with the author of the original package. Browse the archive to ensure uniqueness.

   The name you choose should also (as far as possible) be somewhat descriptive of what your submission actually does; while “descriptiveness” is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, it’s clear that names such as mypackage or jiffy aren’t suitable.

If you are able to use anonymous ftp, you can upload that way. The file README.uploads on CTAN tells you where to upload, what to upload, and how to notify the CTAN management about what you want doing with your upload.

You may also upload via the Web: each of the principal CTAN sites offers an upload page — choose from http://www.ctan.org/upload.html, http://www.dante.de/CTAN/upload.html or http://www.tex.ac.uk/upload.html; the pages lead you through the process, showing you the information you need to supply. This method enforces one file per upload: if you had intended to upload lots of files, you need to bundle them into an ‘archive’ file of some sort; acceptable formats are .zip and .tar.gz (or .tar.bz2).

If you can use neither of these methods, or if you find something confusing, ask advice of the CTAN management: if the worst comes to the worst, it may be possible to mail a contribution. This really is a last-resort route: none of the CTAN sites is anyone’s regular workstation, so if you mail to one of the maintainers, that maintainer then has to upload to CTAN.

If it’s appropriate (if your package is large, or regularly updated), the CTAN management can arrange to mirror your contribution direct into the archive. At present this may only be done if your contribution is available via ftp, and of course the directory structure on your repository must ‘fit’.

README.uploads

README.uploads