What is CTAN?
The acronym stands for “Comprehensive TeX Archive Network”, which
more-or-less specifies what it’s for:
- The aim is to offer a comprehensive collection of TeX resources.
- The content is to be made publicly accessible, via the internet.
- CTAN is a network of archives, which strive to
stay in step with one another.
The basic framework was developed by a TUG working group set up
to resolve the (then existing) requirement for users to know on
which archive site a particular package might be found.
Actual implementation offers three distinct types of host:
- Core archives
- Which form a small, tightly-coupled set of
machines, which perform management functions as well as serving
files, and
- Mirror archives
- Which do no more than take regular copies
of core archives.
- Archive selector
- Which is a meta-service, which routes requests
to an apparently “local” source (mirror or archive).
Note that there is nothing to prevent any archive from supporting
other functions, so a CTAN mirror may also operate as a
CPAN (Perl) mirror and as a SourceForge (general free software)
mirror, and …
Functions that distinguish core archives are:
- Uploads: users may submit new (or updated) material, and
significant changes to the archive are reported via the mailing list
ctan-ann@dante.de
- Weak consistency: changes to the content of the archives are
rapidly distributed to all core archives.
- Providing distribution (TeX Live and MiKTeX) support.
- Catalogue maintenance.
- Mirror monitoring.
Not all core archives offer all of these functions.
Users may contact the maintainers of the core archives via the mailing
list ctan@dante.de
Users who have new material for the archive may submit it using the
German or
UK archive.
Users should ordinarily download material from CTAN via the
archive selector: this uses the
mirror monitor’s database, and uses the caller’s geographical location to
offer an efficient choice of “sufficiently up-to-date” mirror site for
you to connect to. Note that all the download links, given in the web
representation of these FAQs, are set up to use the mirror
selector.
This answer was added: 2011-04-21
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ctan