Re: teTeX and TeX Live interoperability

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@physik.uni-erlangen.de> wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 19:07 +0200, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> Some of these packages have already been separated out:
>> . cm-super (me)
>> . texinfo (me)
>> . lmodern (hmm, who?, I guess again I am a candidate, but for now: no)
>
> In principle, I could imagine maintaining lmodern, but right now I have
> to prepare my PhD examination ...

There's no need to hurry.  And if Florent comes back healthy and with
multiplied energy, you both will easily find a playground for each...

>> But, for now, I see no possibility of *coexistance* of tetex and texlive
>> on the same system (ie mixing of packages) due to the overlap of
>> packages.
>
> Another, rather radical, approach would be to use separate TEXMF trees,
> ie, 
>
> /usr/share/texmf-teTeX          for tetex-{base,extra}
> /usr/share/texmf-TeXLive        for texlive-{...}
> /usr/share/texmf                for *-bin packages (pool files) and
>                                 other packages 
>
> That way, /usr/share/texmf would become something like the TEXMFSITE
> mentioned in the policy. 

Namewise, I'd rather say /usr/share/texmf is TEXMFMAIN, and
/usr/share/texmf-teTeX is TEXMFDIST_TETEX.  There might still be a
problem with the order of trees:  In upstream teTex, it is

...,!!$TEXMFMAIN,!!$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFDIST

But in order for TEXMFLOCAL to be able to shadow files installed with a
Debian package, either Debian packages have to install in one of the
TEXMFDIST trees, or we must keep on swapping MAIN and LOCAL.

> Of course, the *-bin packages would still have
> to conflict with each other, and one probably has to be careful with
> packags that provide new formats. One would have to decide on the search
> order between texmf-teTeX and texmf-TeXLive. It might be good to have
> that configurable in a simple way.
>
> Of course, this would lead to some files being installed twice. I
> personally could live with that ...

It doesn't sound bad.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer