The Future of Debian's TeX packages
The Future of Debian's TeX packages
===================================
I'm currently working on new versions of the TeX packages for Debian,
since Nils doesn't have time to maintain them anymore and Erick said
he needs some help. In fact, there are so many TeX packages that need
to be looked after so that I'm not sure how much I can manage to maintain,
but I will definitely try to do us much as I can.
Most of the packages haven't been touched for over one year now, and
there are a lot of outstanding bugs to be fixed. Besides that, there
are some nice things missing in our TeX distribution: metapost, musictex,
chess macros, concrete fonts, etc.
Nearly all of the TeX base packages are using the old Debian packaging
style, so they need to be converted.
Since there is so much work to do I wanted to get you involved in some
major decisions of the future of Debian-TeX, since we should avoid doing
the same work several times.
So the major question is:
a) do we stick to our own Debian-TeX distribution -- that is:
we have to get all TeX sources/macro packages from CTAN and
have to arrange/compile/config them to apply to our standards, or
b) should we base our TeX packages on an existing TeX distribution
(teTeX, NTeX, etc.) and change only what's necessary to apply
to Debian standards.
a) implies:
- a _lot_ of work
- perhaps we could base development on Nils scripts/config
- we are independent of another development team
- we are solving problems that others have solved already
b) implies:
- we could start with an existing TeX distribution that has
been tested on a wide range of systems
- we could cooperate with a team of TeX freaks, that may know
details much better than we do
- we lose all work that has been put into the existing Debian
TeX packages
- we have to split the existing distribution (teTeX) into small
packages we are used to have in Debian (teTeX comes only in
3 or 4 packages: bin, lib, doc, ...)
There has been a discussion on debian-user a few weeks ago whether one
should switch to teTeX in Debian. I just remember that some wanted to
have teTeX packaged in Debian, since teTeX includes a lot of improvements
and patches to the original TeX sources. Some wanted to have _both_
distributions (Debian and teTeX) to be available at the same time, but
I definitely don't think this is an option, since it is really a lot
of work.
Both solutions a) and b) have there pros and cons, so I don't know yet
which one to choose. That's why I wanted to start a discussion here
on this list. Perhaps you have additional arguments to either solution
or you know of another way c) to do things.
Another problem is the release of Debian 1.2. I think Ian wanted to have
all packages to be converted to the new packaging scheme. But this would
be a lot of work for the TeX packages. So when we should switch over to
teTeX, we will certainly need a couple of weeks/months of beta testing
the new packages before we can release the first version as _stable_.
Cheers,
Chris
PS: I don't expect a decision too soon, but I just wanted to collect more
arguments on this stuff. I will collect all answers I receive and put them
all together in another mail (or perhaps a web page) so that we have a good
base for our decision.
-- _,, Christian Schwarz
/ o \__ schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@debian.org,
! ___; schwarz@informatik.tu-muenchen.de, bm955877@muenchen.org
\ /
\\\______/ ! PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
\ / http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/
-.-.,---,-,-..---,-,-.,----.-.-
"DIE ENTE BLEIBT DRAUSSEN!"
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From: Kenneth MacDonald <kenny@ed.ac.uk>
To: vizzie@airmail.net
Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: fetchmail: anyone working on it?
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>>>>> "Larry" == Larry 'Daffy' Daffner <vizzie@airmail.net> writes:
Larry> It appears that popclient has ben rewritten and released as
Larry> fetchmail. Is anyone working on a debian package? If not,
Larry> I'll volunteer to take this one on, as POP mail is an
Larry> Important Thing for me, and popclient seems to be less than
Larry> optimal.
fetchmail is on the point of a new stable release. Eric Raymond has
been adding features (including the ability to run mailing lists at
the client end). fetchmail-1.9 will be out RSN. As far as I'm aware
Michael Shields <shields@crosslink.net> plans to package it for Debian
as soon as it comes out.
Kenny.
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