[tex-live] Packaging TeXlive as Debian packages

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Tue Jan 11 10:20:00 CET 2005


Norbert Preining wrote:

>>1. It is very important (for me) to be able to install binaries for several
>>architectures.  We keep a central tree which many users on different OSes
>>    
>>
>
>Hmm. This seems hard to be done. AFAIS debian has built in architecture
>management. 
>  
>
I appreciate that the multiple binary thing is a need, but I hope
we don't compromise on Debian normality to accomodate it

>But I guess I have an idea: Maybe we can do the following:
>We have packages:
>	tl-XXXX-bin
>and
>	tl-XXXX-bin-<arch>
>The bin-<arch> install the binaries into
>	/usr/share/texlive/bin/<arch>/...
>and the tl-XXXX-bin creates symlinks to /usr/bin for the right binaries.
>This way you could share the /usr/share/texlive tree, and just have to
>add the the right path.
>  
>
This does not sound too bad, but does it means that on a simple system I 
have to install tl-XXX-bin and tl-XXX-bin-<arch>? how would the 
dependencies work?

I'd start simple, and make tl-XXX-bin put binaries in 
/usr/share/texlive/bin/<arch>, and
put symlinks in /usr/bin. That gets the master machine working as 
normal. Then you
export /usr/share/texlive to the other clients, and make them the 
exception which needs
the special Debian package which does the symlinks.

I suspect we are talking about the same idea, more or less

>
>>I would suggest the above method could be used for 3rd party fonts.  It
>>would prompt for the tarball or loose pfb/afm files which the user
>>provides.  Then it would rename them, place them correctly, create or
>>install the correct supporting files (eg Walter Schmidt's) and run texhash.
>>In that case 'apt-get install tl-font-support-adobe-baskerville' would be
>>the method to install Adobe Baskerville.
>>    
>>
thats getting ambitious :-}


Sebastian



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