Re: About tetex-extra package
Hi Jonathan,
On Mon, Sep 17, 2007 at 17:54 +0200, Jonathan Marti wrote:
> I would like to give you a suggestion about the tetex-extra package.
>
> I wonder if it would be possible considering the possibility of decoupling it
> from the tetex-lang-* packages.
>
> I think it would be cleaner since it would allow us to install tetex-extra
> features without having to install all this non-necessary language support (for
> those who don't need them). By the way, if somebody needs some language support,
> it could install it using the specific package.
>
> What do you think?
I am not sure what you are trying to achieve. If you are worried by
the size of the packages installed as a dependency of tetex-extra,
then please note that the real problem are not the texlive-lang-*
packages but texlive-latex-extra and texlive-fonts-extra. Both bring
in more than 100M when installed.
To give you some background: In etch we have two TeX distribution: The
old teTeX and the newer TeX Live. In lenny there will be only TeX Live
since teTeX is dead upstream. Now there are many users which still
have teTeX installed on their etch machines. For those users
*transitional* packages like tetex-extra where created. The idea
behind such a transitional package is first that it provides *all* the
features provided by the original package. In this particualr cases
this makes sure that any TeX file that worked with teTeX will work
with TeX Live as installed by those transitional packages, too.
Second, such a transitional package can be savely removed after (or
even during) the transition. Unneeded dependencies like unnecessary
language support can be removed at that stage, too.
It is *not* the intention of the transitional tetex-* packages to
define a reasonable subset of TeX Live that a user should install.
Right now there are the metapackages texlive and texlive-full for
this. This also means that no package should Depend on these
transitional packages.
An additional Note: You mention "tetex-extra" features. I am not sure
what you mean by that, but please keep in mind that teTeX's splitting
into tetex-base and tetex-extra was wrong in many places. Trying to
replicate this splitting within the texlive-packages does not make any
sense from my point of view.
cheerio
ralf
Reply to: