Re: [Jordan Mantha] Re: texlive
Hi Ubuntu friends,
earlier than I thought I come to answering this mail (sitting in an
international train with a laptop, things to do and - important data on
an external disk which requires AC power, and this great modern service
of the future f^ing train has no electricity, arghh). So let's read and
answer e-mails instead.
Jordan Mantha <mantha@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Here's my plan of attack. I've just created a Launchpad team (ubuntu-tex)
> [0]. There are a few MOTUs that are also interested. I think the goal
> should be to roughly be the Ubuntu equivalent of the debian-tex-maint group
> in Debian [1].
That's a great idea. The Debian TeX Task Force is currently a bit short
of time, with many people involved in real-life changes. Therefore I
fear no one among us has the time to subscribe to your list. You're of
course welcome to subscribe to debian-tex-maint, but that may be too
much for you, too. So maybe we start with using the BTS as the main
communication channel? And I'll try to remember to send important
announcements to your list, however it's going to be called (ubuntu-tex?)
> The work roughly involves three areas:
>
> 1. Triaging and forwarding TeX bugs to Debian. I've gone through all of the
> textex and texlive bugs on launchpad and was able to close/reject roughly
> 1/3 of them. We need to stay on top of them so people don't have to wait 6
> months to get a reply.
Those other 2 thirds of the bugs - do they already have equivalents in
the Debian BTS?
> 2. Testing and QA, we need to make sure that the TeX packages we end up
> with are as good as we can get. This might mean filing Freeze exceptions to
> get important bugfix releases or backporting fixes to the existing Ubuntu
> versions.
That would be a great service to the TeX community and Ubuntu users.
In particular, I have that infamous breaks-all-hyphenation bug in
mind...
> 3. Transitions. I think gutsy will mostly likely see a tetex -> texlive
> 2007 transition although I haven't seen any specs are talk about that.
> Maybe a good topic of discussion?
There's been an announcement on debian-devel-announce (sorry, no URL in
the train). Essentially:
- we cannot support two TeX systems in the long run, teTeX is abandoned
upstream, and TeXLive already fits in quite well
- we have already uploaded texlive 2007 to unstable which provides
transitional packages for tetex-bin and tetex-extra (and soon
tetex-base, although we didn't want to keep that package name)
This means that in Debian sid, there is currently no teTeX any more.
The hardest part of the transition seem to be all the different things
people can do before and during an upgrade, which we never anticipated
and which gave us a couple of hard RC bugs. But that will be over in a
couple of weeks (hopefully a literally couple, two of them ;-)), and you
Ubuntu people need not notice much of it.
The next important thing are FTBFS bugs, on the one hand because
dependencies are incompatible and cannot be installed, on the other
because of missing dependencies. There are a couple of these bugs
already, we keep a list at
http://pkg-tetex.alioth.debian.org/foreign_bugs.html. I think this is
interesting for you, since you should make sure that none of the
FingTBFS packages are left in gutsy.
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuTeX
I'll put that into my bookmarks.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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