Re: teteX-TeXLive interoperability

[Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>]

Hi Frank!

On Mit, 23 Nov 2005, Frank Küster wrote:
> I hope I am still able to summarize this in a useful way - I'm a little
> drunk, coming home from a good friend's PhD party[1], but this is what I
> recollect.

;-)

> For the first of the two cases above, installing teTeX and TeXLive into
> separate TEXMFDIST trees solves all problems, without introducing much
> additional cost (only some search time if the other tree is available at
> all).

Ok, next version of texlive will do this, if my proposed change to
tex-common (or something similar) goes into tex-common 0.12.

> For the second case, tetex-bin would have to depend on 
> 
> tetex-base | texlive-something

Same for texlive packages.

> and whether this is feasible has to be tested.  But it will be
> impossible if tetex-base and texlive-something conflict, in other words,
> if both install files with the same name into the same tree.

The problem is that *some* texlive packages mix binaries with tex input
files, so this would not allow a parallel installation.

Or do we go for update-alternatives?

> Therefore I think that our design would be more open for future
> improvements if we put teTeX's and TeXLives files into
> TEXMFDIST=/usr/share/texmf-{tetex,texlive} (with user-configurable
> order) and keep /usr/share/texmf as TEXMFMAIN - sorted between
> TEXMFSYSVAR and TEXMFDIST. 

Done in texlive (for -2)

> I don't think there's any need to hurry from the point of view of
> texlive entering the Debian archive, but we should try to get this clear
> rather soon in order to give add-on packages' maintainers definitive
> information. 

See my proposal for tex-common change.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining AT logic DOT at>             Università di Siena
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