[Fedora TeX Live] Unavoidable question: texlive for F-17? :-)

[Michael Ekstrand]

On 11/11/2011 02:19 PM, José Matos wrote:
> OK, it is that time of the year again... :-)
>
> Now that F-16 is out (and in good shape FWIW) the question comes again.
>
> What needs to be done for texlive to be imported in to rawhide (to be F-17)?
>
> Personally it is very difficult to justify that one of Fedora motto's
> "First" can be applied to texlive-2007 in 2012. :-D
>
> I know the amazing work done by Jindrich to have texlive in shape and
> according to Fedora guidelines, so what is the extra mile that needs to
> be crossed to have texlive-2011 in F-17?

I also greatly appreciate Jindrich's work.

I think it might be worth looking in to some scalability issues before 
dropping the split TL packages into F17. When there's a TeXLive change, 
there are a lot of package updates. This causes two problems:

* Many packages to download, even if only a handful have changed. This 
may be impractically difficult to change, and probably isn't a change 
from the monolithic packages. It likely increases update time somewhat, 
as there are more packages in the transaction, but download bandwidth 
increase is likely minimal. Probably a deferrable issue. Long-term, 
there is probably room to make huge improvements over the monolithic 
packages here[1].

* More pressing: The PackageKit GUI imposes (at least in F15, haven't 
checked F16) a hard limit of 2500 updates; any more and it refuses to 
show them. Systems with large portions of TeXLive installed cross this 
boundary, requiring command-line updates with 'yum'. My laptop has >3K 
TeXLive packages installed.

In a related vein, yum and rpm seem to have difficulty scaling to 6K+ 
packages on a system. The startup, transaction test, and 
post-transaction database updates take quite some time on my laptop; far 
less on my wife's desktop which doesn't have near as many packages 
installed. Given that probably half my packages are from TeXLive, it 
seems that this may be an issue to at least think about before shipping 
TeXLive in its split state. It would be good to avoid degrading users' 
update and install experience too much by changing the TeXLive packaging 
method.

I also have a smaller wish - making it easier to install documentation 
collections. If I have a collection installed, I want all the available 
documentation for stuff in that collection, but there aren't doc 
metapackages for the collection metapackages. I've worked around this by 
writing a script which scans my system for TeXLive packages with 
available but uninstalled -doc packages and prints a list of them for me 
to install, but that's kinda a workaround. IMO, this should not at all 
be a blocker, though. Once the TeXLive packages have been audited & put 
in Rawhide, I can file this as an RFE bug against them and it can be 
looked at later. Unless it's easy to fix and someone has extra time :).

I do really appreciate the work on these packages. They work great for 
me & I like having an up-to-date, modular installation. Just thought I'd 
share my experiences as a user with an eye towards things that would be 
useful to consider before sending the packages to the rest of the Fedora 
userbase.

Best,
- Michael

1. There have been some updates that haven't seemed to update 
everything, so some selective updating already seems to be in place, but 
I am not sure what. It's somewhat mysterious to me, as I haven't looked 
at the SRPM and so far can only report on what I have observed as a user.