Re: Providing an up-to-date TeX system for etch: teTeX, TeXlive, or what?

[Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de>]

On Wed, Mar 15, 2006 at 13:47 +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> 
> > pdfetex is contained in texlive-base-bin (as it is the base of all tex
> > formats), and this packages does not go well with tetex ...

Now I remember. The texlive-pdfetex-bin was merged into texlive-base-bin
when you tried to get past the ftp-masters. That makes Frank's
possibility 3 difficult, too, since one would need alternatives/
diversions for many binaries.

> > I don't see that it makes much sense to do this. Wouldn't it be easier
> > to get the new pdfetex sources and put them into the tetex-bin package?
> > Normally these packages are quite well incorporated so not much is
> > needed besides unpacking it into the respective directory, maybe not
> > overwriting all the makefile(am/in/whatever). One could even take the
> > texlive-bin source slice which should work out of the box (??).
> 
> Rumor goes that pdftex 1.40 will use autoconf2.59, and this *might*
> cause problems in the tetex-bin (and texlive, too) sources which
> otherwise use autoconf2.13.  It might, I have no idea whether they
> actually will.

Ok, so using an updated pdftex tarball within tetex-bin might prove
difficult. And using the developer version of tetex-bin available via
rsync is probably not a good idea. Would it be possible to use the
pdftex tarball to build an independent pdftex package on which both
tetex-bin and texlive-base-bin could depend? IMO that would be the
cleanest solution. In addition, getting TeX Live 2006 into Etch wouldn't
be as critical, as long as a current pdftex is the main concern¹.

cheerio
ralf

1 I agree that other programs are important, too, but there seems to be
  much less change with most other programs.