Re: Just some questions and remarks.
Patrice DUROUX <duroux@lirmm.fr> wrote:
> Dear all Debian LaTeX users and TeTeX maintainers,
>
> I really appreciate the effort and the quality
> of the TeX/LaTeX environment packaging in Debian.
> It has achieved a lot of progress since their born.
> But I would like to know why there are still outdated
> version of some base files w.r.t. the CTAN archive.
I don't know which version you are referring to (tetex 1.0 from stable
or tetex 2.0.2 from unstable). For stable, well, stable _is_
outdated. As for unstable, we don't provide a CTAN_$date.deb, but tetex
packages, and the current released tetex, which we ship in unstable, is
from early last year.
There will be a new tetex release soon, but we doubt that this will be
included into sarge. Or rather, if the release plan for sarge (freeze in
June) is kept as it has recently been proposed, it will for sure not get
into it.
> Is this a consequence of the fact that the LaTeX files
> are coming from the TeTeX tarball and not directly from CTAN?
> Is there a reason for this? Is there really no way to have
> something more close to CTAN with a kind of "update-*" command?
> I mean a script "update-latex" that updates the local LaTeX
> installation from a CTAN repository. This may become a
> way to reduce the size of tetex-base.
There have been some discussions about an implementation for this
(e.g. in German in the newsgroup de.comp.text.tex a couple of weeks
ago), but AFAIK nobody really started coding. The problem with this is
that there is no straightforward way to install the contents of some
directory on CTAN into a TEXMF tree, and to figure out the
dependencies.
You know that you can easily integrate new files from CTAN by installing
them "by hand" into proper directories under /usr/local/share/texmf/?
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie
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