Re: Providing an up-to-date TeX system for etch: teTeX, TeXlive, or what?
Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> wrote:
>> 1. Update selected programs in tetex-bin (pdfTeX, xdvi [1]), don't
>> touch the rest, especially not the TEXMF trees
>
> pdftex is an obvious candidate for updates. Have there been any
> important changes to xdvi? Or do you expect them?
I have not followed xdvi development, so I don't know. I just wanted to
point out that xdvi is an important program to look at. Just looked,
and no, it doesn't seem as if we're missing anything important
currently.
>> 2. Decide that TeXlive be the default TeX system in Debian, and keep
>> teTeX only for package building purposes for etch.
>
> This would leave people maintaining TeX using Debian packages /and/
> actively using TeX themselves in an unfortunate situation. Either they
> use the TeX system that is used on the buildds, or they use the system
> that is recommended for actual work.
Yes, this is an unfortunate side effect. However, I don't think that it
is a killer argument, for a couple of reasons:
- (La)TeX is stable, and if we change less in the packages we will get
less bugs. I don't expect that we need to do many packaging changes
if we decide to switch teTex to "maintenance-only mode" instead of
actively pushing development.
- We actually get most of the bug reports from users, not packagers.
Granted, the bugs from buildds etc. tend to be the severe ones, but
these are also the bugs that we never detect on our working systems,
and need to use chroots for debugging, anyway.
- Personally, I don't mind the diskspace needed for a "sid-tetex"
chroot.
- There have in fact been phases in the past where I didn't write and
process TeX documents at all for weeks, but this has had no effect at
all on my detecting bugs in the teTeX packages.
>> The advantages and disadvantages of these solutions, as I can see them
>> currently, are:
>>
>> 1. + Automatic updates of all systems that have TeX installed
>> + The amount of work can be controlled well, hopefully
>> - No updates of TEXMF trees
>
> We could change the order in TEXMFDIST and advice people to install the
> necessary texlive packages.
That's a good point.
>> - duplication of work, we already have TeXlive
>
> Would it be possible if tetex-bin would not buid/install pdftex.
> Instead, tetex-bin would depend on texlive-pdftex-bin, or whatever it is
> called.
Yes, I think that would be fairly easy from a packaging point of view.
The only complication is that texlive-pdftex-bin obiously can't depend
on any infrastructure files in tetex-bin or texlive-whatever-bin, only
on tex-common.
It seems to me that this hybrid 1+3 variant might in fact be a good
compromise. Norbert, what do you think? Hilmar? Florent?
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
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