Re: Packaging TeXLive 2008: Source packages
Hi Frank,
all the best for 2009!!
nice to see you back! ;-)))
On Di, 13 Jan 2009, Frank Küster wrote:
> 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?
I am not happy with that, because we would have to:
- rewrite the whole packaging
- change the source package layout completely, because some things in
the -bin soure package would need files from the texmf trees tar ball
for bin package creation.
- as you said, much bigger.
> - It is much clearer for outsiders how our packaging works, and
> therefore easy to fix things without messing up.
Behhh, yes, but I am sure that this will messy anyway, just in a
different way.
And, it would mean rewriting everything, and I am not sure anyone has
the time for that!
> - Other distros use the same tarballs, therefore we might at some point
> be able to share packaging efforts
I don't consider that in any way realistic. I not even heard about
Ubuntu people contributing (but the first libpoppler patch)...
> - 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.
Upstream (Karl) was quite unhappy about that, the tarballs were made for
BSD AFAIR. But we (Karl and me) consider the ISO image or the SVN
repository the "upstream" distribution.
Furthermore, switching to the tarballs would make it much harder to do
intermediate updates. While using the svn repository as we do now we can
easily ship out
2008.svnNNNNN-1
when nosell packages are removed etc etc. Less need for .dfsg Versions,
and in addition there will be updates to packages.
Best wishes
Norbert
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Dr. Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining@debian.org> Debian TeX Group
gpg DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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