[jwstarr]

Author here. Thank you for the feedback. I may tackle a history of the registries from netlib and CTAN forward in the near future.

For this article, I deliberately kept the scope limited because it was getting rather long.

[dhosek]

I was around for the initial discussions on CTAN having run a popular FTP archive for TeX-related software in the late 80s/early 90s. Given the heterogeneity of computing platforms in those days (EBCDIC vs ASCII, bigendian vs littleendian, CR vs LF vs CRLF to separate lines, blocks vs streams for file structures), even a relatively straightforward text-based archive had its potential footguns. Add in the lack of anything resembling a reliable cross-platform scripting language (Perl was the first contender in this space, and didn’t have the insane cross-platform reach TeX did at the time) and there were some rather heroic efforts to use TeX itself as the scripting platform. The best-known and most widely used of these would be docstrip which was used as a sort of WEAVE/TANGLE for TeX code, but I remember there being an effort to also do some translation of files and out of BASE64-encoded format for reliable cross-platform transport. The original CTAN FTP server in the UK also had the cool feature that if you wanted the contents of a directory, adding .zip to the end of that directory name would return the directory’s contents zipped.

Being a first mover has had its drawbacks of course. Most notably, the lack of any sort of versioning of dependencies and that everything is functionally in a single flat directory (even if on disk it’s arranged in a hierarchical tree, that tree is flattened for all inputs). People who complain about the functionality of newer dependency managers have no idea how much better even the worst are compared to what it was like in the past.