[tex-live] teTeX: no next release

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Mon May 29 16:25:07 CEST 2006


Michael Peters <mpeters at mac.com> wrote:

>  
> On Monday, May 22, 2006, at 02:53AM, Thomas Esser <te at dbs.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>I am sorry to announce some bad news about teTeX: there won't be a next
>>release. To be more precise: there won't be a next release done by me.
>
[...]
> I've started an rpm specific package repository, which is at
> http://www.tetexrpm.org/ for the noarch texmf stuff. Just recently,
> sourceforge approved the project for housing the rpm spec files there
> - project name is tetexrpm. I have not uploaded any files yet, but the
> point of using sourceforge is to make it easy for other people to
> contribute by adding/updating the spec files for the individual macro
> packages from CTAN.
>
> If there is any interest whatsoever from people on this list helping
> out with that, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm certainly open to
> changing how things are done in tetexrpm if there is a need to do so.
>
> perhaps the binary parts of tetex can be packaged in rpm from TeX
> Live, and the texmf as rpms from the CTAN .zip files. Something
> similar to tetex could then be achieved via yum/apt groups so that a
> groupinstall can pull in the necessary macro packages.
>
> Thoughts comments?

It's not clear to me what you want to achieve with that tetexrpm
project.  If teTeX were still actively developed, I understand it might
make sense to keep packages for rpm-based distributions as compatible as
possible, and maintain them at a central place.  But now that it's been
abandoned, I don't see the benefit of this.

Either someone steps up and takes the task of maintaining teTeX; but
then the rpm creation is the smaller part.  The real work would be to
keep the texmf tree up-to-date, and to take care for the source tree.
This shouldn't be done with rpm packages as the main target (nor deb's,
for that matter), but with a standard "./configure; make; make install"
as it is currently.

Furthermore, I think the best thing we got from Thomas is the
infrastructure, which has been merged into TeXlive and is still
maintained by him there.  Work on selecting and updating CTAN packages,
and in creating useful collections, is probably better done within
TeXlive, or by making the MikTeX installer work with a preinstalled TeX
system.

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


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