[tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Fri Aug 22 00:27:27 CEST 2008


2008/8/21 Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org>:
>    I agree that including scheme-full is essential, but I'm not sure
>    whether it should be default for the downstream packaging.
>    Initially I thought that scheme-basic will suffice. The reason for
>    it is that not everybody needs full TeX Live installation and also
>    many programs have build dependencies to TeX Live just to build
>    documentation.
>
> Sure, I understand.
>
>    So installing scheme-full to fullfil that seems a waste of resources
>    to me.
>
> Perhaps the ideal would be for those packages that use TeX for
> documentation to depend not just on "TeX Live" in general, but to a
> texlive-scheme-basic, texlive-scheme-medium, or whatever they actually
> need.  Not that that's easy, I know ...
>
> And anyway, don't they really depend only on texlive if someone wants to
> *build* the documentation -- as opposed to just read it?  Hopefully
> those other programs provide prebuilt pdf/html/whatever.  Seems like
> building the doc would be relatively rare.
>
I think that documentation should be built by developers but there are
also "source RPMs". They might contain documentation as TeX sources.
And e.g. some XML tools may require TeX as a typesetting engine.

>    On the other hand, user who wants a full
>    TeX Live installation could have it via "yum instal
>    texlive-scheme-full". Are you ok with it?
>
> Well, I'm certainly not in a position to insist on anything.  Neither
> choice stands out as obviously superior to me.
>
> With scheme-basic as the default, I suspect most people who actually
> want to use TeX (for anything) will be frustrated, since very little of
> what they expect will be installed, while others will happily figure out
> the yum invocation above.
>
I think all redhat users know how to use "yum search" and "yum
provides" for searching RPMs.

> Conversely, with scheme-full as the default, some people who just want
> to install the other programs will be frustrated at the waste of disk
> space and/or bandwidth, while others have plenty of disk and aren't
> bothered to have it all.
>
> It seems there is no way to please everyone.  What I can report is that
> during those many years when the distros were still based on teTeX, and
> teTeX was (essentially) not being updated, there was massive confusion
> among TeX users that packages and programs that had been available for
> years were not installed on their brand new system.  This isn't quite
> the same situation, I know, since at least the material will be up to
> date if they figure out how to install it, but it does seem reminiscient ...
>
It is also questionable whether to use "rpm -I" or "rpm -U". Some
users might need several versions of TL and switch between them by
setting PATH, other user would just like to upgrade.

> Best,
> karl
>



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz


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