[tex-live] Feature requests tlmgr

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Thu Nov 18 01:43:07 CET 2010


On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 7:20 AM, Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> On 2010-11-17 01:40, George N. White III wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2010-11-16 20:20, George N. White III wrote:
>>>> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Pander <pander at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to propose the following feature requests for TeX Live.
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) Can the installer ask if a cron job will be installed that will check
>>>>> twice a day if updates are available and will pop up tlmgr GUI? This is the
>>>>> same idea as Ubuntu's update manager.
>>>>>
>>>>> 2) Can the installer offer an option to enable e-mail notification when
>>>>> updates are available for server installation? This is the same idea as
>>>>> http://www.digipedia.pl/man/doc/view/apticron.1/
>>>>>
>>>>> 3) Also provide documentation to enable, disable and configure this after an
>>>>> installation has been done.
>>>>>
>>>>> Apticron is scheduled for 13:00 and 19:00 hours. Perhaps 13:10 and 19:10
>>>>> would be conveniend times.
>>>>
>>>> What problem are you trying to solve?
>>>
>>> I would like to have automated notification when updates are available
>>> for my desktop (pop-up) and for my server (e-mail). So I don't have to
>>> chekc manually if updates are there for all the different systems.
>>
>> Would having distro packages for TL (so you can get update notifications
>> the same way you to for distro packages now) be a good solution?
>
> Yes, but unfortunately Ubuntu is still shipping TeX Live 2009.
> Meanwhile, I have gotten used to the frequent TeX Live updates which are
> of high quality, so I like to keep using tlmgr.

At present you are stuck with tlgmr, but taking  a longer view it becomes
a question of whether collective efforts are better spend improving tlmgr,
reducing the delays in release of distro packages, or some other solution.
TeX Live is hard to package -- it is big and depends on many 3rd party
tools and libraries.

> Also, most GNU/Linux distributions are not really keen on volatile
> packages so I do not expect that distributions can offer the same up to
> date TeX Live as TeX Live can provide itself. For example Scribus is
> also shipped as scribus-ng (development branch) in Ubuntu. Such an
> initiative would be welcome for TeX Live too.
>
> I hope, Ubuntu et al. will one day fix all this in a proper way so that
> e.g. dependencies in font package are not conflicting anymore.
>
> Fonts in TeX Live are much more up to date than the ttf-* packages. This
> gives rise to all sorts of problems at the moment. I had to manually
> delete the files in ttf-freefont because they were conflicting with the
> newer files shipped by TeX Live and too many Ubuntu package dependencies
> prevented me from deinstalling ttf-freefont the correct way.

Did you try adding ttf-freefont to the "provides" list in a dummy package?
You probably need to edit some config file to add the TL font dirs so other
apps can find them.

Meanwhile, libraries used in TL are sometimes older than the distro versions.

[...]

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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