Re: The Splitting of teTeX

["C.M. Connelly" <c@eskimo.com>]

Christoph,

I like the idea of splitting things up more than they are, but perhaps
not quite the way Thomas is proposing.


* International Language Support

I pretty much only ever use English (I may use the occasional Spanish,
German, or French word, phrase, or quote, but I would never create a
complete document in one of those languages), and would rather save
the disk space needed for that support.  (Especially if I could
trivially install and uninstall it if I needed it.)  So splitting some
of the non-English language support off makes sense from my
perspective (based on the information you sent, that would also make
czech, greek, polish, and cyrillic (Russian & other langauges, too?)
similar to the french package (but still free, unlike french, I
guess?)).  Babel is part of LaTeX's required directory, so it would be
available no matter what.


* ConTeXt and Omega

I also can't see myself ever using things like ConTeXt or Omega, so
splitting those off is a good thing.


* Fonts

Splitting the fonts out works for me, too -- I don't like or use
bitmap fonts any more than I absolutely have to (or when I'm too busy
or lazy to wait for gv to render PostScript fonts), so I don't really
need them and could, again, use the disk space they take up for other
things.


* LaTeX

I really like having the LaTeX packages split out -- doing so means
that Debian could update the LaTeX code separately from the rest of
teTeX, so that it would be much easier to keep your LaTeX distribution
up-to-date.  I'm not sure where the LaTeX's required directory has
gone in this scheme -- I don't see it listed under latex-base, where I
would expect it to be -- but I would think that required should
definitely be part of latex-base.  AMS-LaTeX is part of required now,
too; while I could make a case for packaging it separately, it's
easier (and more correct) to just include it in latex-base.  Doing so
would mean that if a new version of AMS-LaTeX packages or classes
comes out, a new version of latex-base would have to be made but
that's probably not as bad as it seems.


* Source files

Would tetex-src be split up, as well?  Maybe as tetex-latex-base-src
or tetex-latex-extras-src?  Should the packaging more closely mirror
the layout of CTAN?  (Maybe split into tetex-latex-contrib-supported
vs. tetex-latex-contrib-unsupported; although those names might imply
that the support comes from Debian.)


* Documentation

We might also want to consider what to do about the documentation --
install man pages by default, and maybe info files, too, but have the
HTML, PostScript, PDF, or other formats be separate packages that
aren't installed by default.

* Naming of packages

Obviously all these packages should be named something like
tetex-polish, tetex-czech, tetex-latex-base, and so on; we might want
to name the font packages something like tetex-font-yandy,
tetex-font-type1, tetex-font-ams, and so on.


* New ``task-'' packages or an installer?

It would also be nice to have multiple ``task-tex'' packages that
would install a subset of the whole set of packages; for example,
task-tex might install everything you need to use TeX (the TeX
executables and documentation, as well as minimal fonts); task-latex
would depend on task-tex and also install latex-base and latex-extra;
task-tex-ps might depend on task-tex and also install Type 1 fonts;
task-tex-polish might depend on task-tex or task-latex (I'm not clear
on whether the Polish language support depends on LaTeX or just TeX;
maybe LaTeX with Babel and settings for Polish is the LaTeX
equivalent?); and so on.

Another alternative would be to create a menu-based installer utility
that allowed the user to specify which packages they wanted to install
by presenting them with information about what the individual packages
contained and what they would allow the user to do.  The installer
could handle dependency checking, too, although that would probably be
unecessary as the dependencies would have to be handled properly by
the individual package control files in order to allow packages to be
managed using apt-get, console-apt, gnome-apt, or some future
replacement.


Anyway, those are some of my thoughts.

   CMC

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   C.M. Connelly               c@eskimo.com                   SHC, DS
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