[tex-live] Re: Debian-TeXlive Proposal II

[Norbert Preining]

Dear Frank, dear Karl, dear all!

On Die, 25 Jan 2005, Frank Küster wrote:
> Why not texlive- or tex-live-? All package management systems I know of

Ok, Karl also suggested texlive- prefix. Good with me.

> > 	lib-XXX		->	tl-lib-XXX	(??)
> 
> Especially for libkpathsea it is perhaps better to keep it static. Olaf

All the binaries in TeXlive use a static libkpathsea, but also static
linked in libjpeg, libpng etc (pdftex). I guess these `should' be made
dynamic depending on the respective debian libraries.

> > 	hyphen-XXX	->	tl-hyphen-XXX
> > 	scheme-XXX	->	tl-scheme-XXX
> 
> I'm not familiar to the tex-live splitting scheme. But aren't these
> hyphen packages really small bits with only one or a couple of input

they are really small, but the idea is that you can install only those
languages you need. But see below.

> > TPM-Requires between these packages are mapped to Debian Dependencies.
> >
> > All other files obtained from a TPM-Require are included in the 
> > debian package.
> 
> This does not lead to one file being in two packages?

No. (Well, more or less no, there are 3 or so packages with
package-package dependencies which produce problems, but we ignore these
inter-package dependencies (not the collection-package dependencies)).

> > As an example, tl-chemistry Debian-depends on
> > (binaries)
> > 	(no)
> 
> As a Debian package, it must of course depend on either some tl-XXX-bin,
> or on tl-XXX-bin | tetex-bin. I think it would be desirable to be able

ok.

> Since I didn't see any sense in TEXMFDIST for a Debian package[1], I
> was inclined not to use it, but keep all files in TEXMFMAIN (plus the
> generated ones in VARTEXMF). I think we should coordinate on this. 

Karl, Sebastian, what do you mean?

> > These packages contain the binaries (what about the included man pages?)
> 
> "Normal" Debian packages are required to ship a man page for every
> binary in the package, not in a accompanying -doc package. I think this
> would make sense for the served packages, too.

Good.

> > - Is it possible to circumvent the double installation of binaries for the
[...]
> Well, why bother at all about duplicate files? If you're going to set up
> a server that will host application data for your department, you should
> really by a harddisk big enough that a couple of double binaries don't

Right. Thus I consider this discussion finished. First I go for normal
debian packages, later I may provide /srv packages for different
arch-os.

> > - What is still unclear for me is how to cope with all the packages: If we
> >   do it the way proposed below, we have:
> > 	bin-packages:	 80
> 
> How do you get so many binary packages? tetex-bin contains 139
> executable files, but only 61 of them are actually binaries - the rest

Yes yes yes. The -bin comes from the
	bin-XXXXX.tpm
stuff. `binary' here means some executable, not necessarily a real
binary.

> tl-bin-basic, and put all the rest into one tl-bin-...?

See below.

> > 	collection:	 75
> 
> This looks like quite tiny bits. Are these collections grouped
> hierarchically in the current texlive installer? Maybe you can add some

Unfortunately not.

> Personally, I would prefer to split TEXmF into something like 10 or 25
> packages.  But I must say that I never made any real effort to actually

On Die, 25 Jan 2005, Karl Berry wrote:
>     - What is still unclear for me is how to cope with all the packages: If we
>       do it the way proposed below, we have:
> 
> Maybe you need a new "super collection" concept, called say an
> "aggregation", where you slice and dice the 193 packages in the current
> proposal into some more reasonable number, say 10.
> 
> I don't know what they are, though.  basic, morefonts, morepackages,
> morebinaries, something like that?  That is, each of the 193 would be in
> exactly one (no more no less) of these 10, whatever they are.


My honest opinion is that it makes no sense to group the packages in
some more or less random order into 10-15 packages.

What we COULD do is ADD additional packages (Karl's aggregations) which
users could just select and which depend on all the other stuff.

What kind of users do we expect:
- Those who want just a full TeX installation:
	So give them `texlive-full' which depends on all the 193
	packages
- Those who want a minimal TeX system (there are quite a lot there)
	They want to select binaries/languages/etc
	But WE cannot decide what is `minimal' for them! Does it 
	include chemistry stuff? omega? IPA? CJK?

So my suggestion is to actually DO some additional `aggregations' (maybe
only a few) but otherwise keep the collections.

> BTW, aren't the schemes irrelevant to debian? 

Yes. Forget them.

Best wishes

Norbert

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Norbert Preining <preining AT logic DOT at>         Technische Universität Wien
sip:preining at at43.tuwien.ac.at                             +43 (0) 59966-690018
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