uploading distfiles

[Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost>]

One point about (La)TeX packages is that by default they are not retrieved from CTAN, but only from places like ftp.nebsd.org.  Consequently, creating a package requires not just the normal package files (e.g., Makefile, etc.) but also uploading the distfile.  This raises several questions:

- How does one actually do the uploading manually?

- Why is this the case?  Other packages also have unversioned distfiles and yet they are downloaded from the primary source.  Changes are detected by failing checksums in which case the download falls back to, for example, ftp.netbsd.org.  Why is this not done for CTAN packages?

Thanks for any pointers on this.

Cheers,
Brook