Re: Packaging TeXLive 2008: Source packages
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> Hi Frank,
>
> all the best for 2009!!
>
> nice to see you back! ;-)))
Don't know how much I'm back; but I have promised myself, my colleagues
and my boss to work less this year ;-). And it was fun to think about
TeX packages again!
> I am not happy with that, because we would have to:
> - rewrite the whole packaging
I haven't yet looked at what you already did and what needs to be done,
but I had in mind that you said that we would need to make large changes
anyway, with the tpm files having gone away.
If that is wrong, I think the whole basis of my reasoning is gone...
> - 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.
That's a bug in the tarball splitting. A bug that is also a valid reason
not to use the tarballs as source.
>> - 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.
My memories are a bit different: A BSD guy first asked for that, but a
couple of other people stepped in and said that they liked the
idea. Including me.
> But we (Karl and me) consider the ISO image or the SVN
> repository the "upstream" distribution.
I still think that we should in the long run aim at having sensible
upstream tarballs that are usable for distributions. IMO, that's the
consequence of TeXLive being now the standards UNIX TeX distribution.
But I must say that I was surprised myself by how the splitting was
done. I think I will bring this up on the tldistro mailing list, once I
understand TL 2008 better.
> 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.
Do you mean upstream will provide something like point releases? Anyway,
I guess if we really want tarballs, it's not to hard to generate them
scripted.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (TeXLive)
VCD Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg, ADFC Miltenberg
B90/Grüne KV Miltenberg
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