How do I set the documentation PDF for my package?

Question

I wanted to check the syntax of something in one of my packages, and rather than hunt for the file on my system I just did texdoc hobby on the command line. To my dismay, this brought up the PDF containing the code, not the main documentation. When I submitted the package to CTAN, I split the documentation into two parts: the user documentation and the code documentation. As the latter is produced from the .dtx, it gets named hobby.pdf, the user documentation can be named whatever I like so I chose hobby_doc.pdf. It's quite reasonable that texdoc hobby produces hobby.pdf (and texdoc hobby_doc produces the user documentation), but that doesn't seem like the right thing to do from a user's perspective.

There seem to me to be two ways to fix this:

1. Change my filenames so that the code becomes hobby_code.pdf and the documentation is hobby.pdf. Ideally, I'd like this to be automatic so that I still have hobby.dtx and hobby.tex but pdflatex hobby.dtx produces hobby_code.pdf. I know that one can't change \jobname from within a document, but as this is a .dtx, I thought that maybe the compilation process isn't as simple as it seems and it might still be possible to change the output filename. Is it?

2. Set up texdoc so that texdoc hobby points to hobby_doc.pdf. This, as I understand it, is eminently possible but it would need doing officially. So how do I go about making such a change and is it a simple thing to ask for? (If complicated, then clearly I should use Option 1 even if I can't do so automatically.)

Answer 1

I've seen requests from time to time on the Tex Live list by authors as well as by users to set another default for texdoc for a specific package (because of similarly »wrong« default documentation). You probably could do the same.