Re: TeX Live plans for the squeeze cycle
Hi Marc, hi all,
On Sun, 16 Aug 2009, Marc Brockschmidt wrote:
> * Which major upstream releases of texlive are expected in the next two
> years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which might be a bit
> flaky?
Since lenny which includes TL2007 there was TL2008 release in September
2008 (AFAIR) and TL2009 will be release approximately September, too.
Same rhythm will continue over the next years.
> * How much time do you usually need from a new upstream release of texlive
> to a stable Debian package in unstable?
Hard to say. The problem is that between TL2007 and TL2008 the complete
infrastructure has changed, and many scripts had to be adapted. We have
pre-release packages for TL2009 ready, but far far from even
experimental. So for 2009 after release we will need at least another
time frame.
In addition, time and contributors are rare. I who made most of the
programming in recent times (due to Frank having changed job) will
move job and country from Austria to Japan end of September, so I
don't know in the beginning how much time I will have.
> * How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should those
> happen? Can we do something to make them easier?
Normally the only big transition is libkpathsea4 -> libkpathsea5 which
we will have in TL2009. But not sooo big, since rdepends we have
several texlive packages plus 23 other packages.
I don't see any way you can help us in easing, what is really needed
here is people testing and reporting the preliminary packages, that
is the most difficult part, and then analyze the breakage reasons.
So bottomline I see:
- Till December I am not sure we can get TL2009 into stable
- Normally between release of TL and Debian release that should
be possible later one, because we (upstream, where I am also lead
programmer) hope that there will be no more changes in the infra
structure that deep (I completely rewrote the system).
If you have any other questions or anyone here on the list comments,
please share it, I might easily forgotten something.
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
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