[tex-live] TeXlive infrastructure

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Tue May 2 22:58:47 CEST 2006


karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

> If you have the inclination to figure out exactly which files should be
> copied (or removed from) where, that would be great.

I've talked Walter Schmidt, psnfss maintainer, and he suggested to put
all the base fonts required by psnfss (the files in
fonts/urw/urw-base35) into one tpm file.  That would imply also removing
lots of stuff.  The to-be-removed parts are those of currently unknown
origin, so I can't say to which existing or new tpm they should be moved.

>     In particular, I'm confused about the fonts required by psnfss: The TeX
>     Catalogue has one entry for them, urw-base35, 
>
> I'm not too sure what the distinction is between urw-base35 and psnfss
> (both of which have Catalogue entries), for that matter.

psnfss are the LaTeX support files (sty, fd, map, documentation) for the
basic 35 postscript fonts and some other free type1 fonts.  urw-base35
are the actual font files for the base35 fonts (including tfm), there
must also be a catalogue entry (or some) for the font files of the other
fonts.


>     several tpm files, one for each font family.  
>
> One thing I can answer is why each font family ends up in its own tpm.
> When Fabrice implemented the mostly-automated tpm updates for texmf-dist
> (and texmf-doc), the font family level was pretty much the only way to
> do it.  We couldn't make tpm's based on foundries (everything would end
> up in "public", etc.), and there is nothing else.  So each font, pretty
> much, ends up in its own tpm.
>
> The texmf/tpm/collection-* tpm's which aggregate the various packages
> are maintained by hand.
>
> Does that help?

I understand the aim; but for example fonts/urw contains nothing but
subdirectories, urw-base35 is one of them.  Is it really needed that
these 3 times 35 font files are dispersed over 3 times 9 directories -
why not just have three?  I can imagine that the historical reason are
exactly all those virtual font files that are in the tpms for these
fonts, but not in urw-base35:  They would have made the urw-base35.tpm
very large, and they make some substructure necessary.

I'll try to find out what these other fonts are.  Is there a Web
interface to the old perforce repository, so that I can browse log
files? 

Regards, Frank


-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)



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