[Fedora TeX Live] Idea for Further Improving TeX Live on Fedora

[Michael Ekstrand]

On 09/18/2011 11:24 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 15:20, Michael Smith wrote:
>> All,
>> 
>> Recently the following idea was suggested on the Fedora Forum. To
>> quote:
>> 
>> "Am I the only one who thinks this is the wrong way to package TeX
>> Live
> 
> Maybe not the only one, but *packaging tlmgr* is the wrong way for
> any linux distribution in my opinion.
> 
> (Keep in mind that the author of tlmgr is himself a mantainer of TeX 
> Live packages for Debian and he wrote another few thousands of lines 
> of code for TeX Live packaging of Debian. The distribution itself 
> doesn't use tlmgr at all.)
> 
> Just a few reasons why you don't want to package just tlmgr:
> 
> - anyone who wants to use tlmgr and the latest packages is free to 
> install TeX Live manually
> 
> - when TeX Live 2012 will be released, repositories for TeX Live
> 2011 will be removed (there is only an archive left on a single
> server, but that one doesn't include the latest version of packages)
> 
> - this means that Fedora would have to create its own package 
> repositories, unless you want your tlmgr package to become obsolete 
> before FC 15(?) is even released (imagine that Fedora gets released 
> and two months later repositories are removed from CTAN servers)
> 
> - repositories only provide the latest version of each package; it
> is basically impossible to install original version and packages
> from "frozen" 2011 release (the only way to do so is to fetch the
> huge tgz, checkout SVN or fetch iso image, but in either case you
> don't really get the comfort of tlmgr)
> 
> - original TeX Live gets some testing and at least the most nastly 
> bugs are usually discovered in time; when packages are updated,
> there is zero checking being done before updates proliferate to TeX
> Live; if author submits a broken package to CTAN, it gets updated in
> TeX Live unconditionally; that usually gets discovered after a few
> days, but in the meantime packages are broken for everyone and there
> is no way to recover (apart from using backups or by manually
> downloading an older version from SVN repository)

Two more huge advantages to RPM packaging:

- Having TeXLive content in RPMs allows other software to depend on and
make use of particular TeX packages.

- Packaging as RPMs allows easy dependency on other software (e.g.
texlive-minted requires python-pygments).  This could be partially
achieved by adding PackageKit integration to tlmgr, but that only does
the initial installation and doesn't encode the requirement that as long
as you have the source highlighting package installed you need
python-pygments in a place where it is useful for maintaining the
installation.

These alone warrant RPM-based distribution in my opinion.

- Michael