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

[Michael Smith]

Thanks a lot for all your feedback, I wasn't aware of many of these
things, so it's a pleasure to learn more.

Michael

On 09/19/2011 02:15 AM, Michael Ekstrand wrote:
> 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
> 
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