Packaging TeXLive 2008: Source packages

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi all, especially Norbert!

I wish you all a very happy new year, lots of fun and success, good
friends and all!


I just had a first look at TeXLive 2008 and what Norbert started wrt
packaging.  Here are some thoughts. Err, no, I didn't come further than
one thought up to now, but I'm sending this e-mail anyway.

1. Source packages

TeXLive now comes as lzma-compressed tarballs, there are 4 of them: 

        texmf (the texmf trees), 
        source (the TL-specific sources), 
        bin (the binaries distributed with TL), 
        extra (miscellanous other files)

AFAICS, we don't need the contents of the bin tarball at all, because
the sources (or copies in case of scripts) are also in the source
tarball. Extra isn't worth a source package, we should simply copy these
files into the diff.gz. (And talk with upstream about that).

Shouldn't we switch to using the texmf and source files as our orig.tar
files (dpkg-source in lenny understands lzma) and consequently to having
only two source packages, texlive-source and texlive-texmf?

This would mean larger source packages and hence more traffic upon
updates. On the other hand, there are some advantages which I think are
important:

- It is much clearer for outsiders how our packaging works, and
  therefore easy to fix things without messing up.

- Other distros use the same tarballs, therefore we might at some point
  be able to share packaging efforts

- If we find that some aspects of the tarballs are a pain (sheer size,
  splitting scheme) we can suggest upstream to change that, and everyone
  will profit from it.

In case that we find that the additional traffic upon any upload of
texlive-texmf is too large for people tracking sid or testing, we could

use a trick: 

Use texlive-20080822-texmf.tar.lzma as the identical source tarball for
two (or even three) different source packages, which only install their
part of the tarball and ignore the rest. 

What do you think?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg