[tex-live] TL 2009: Upgrade works! Future plans?

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi,

I can only confirm everything Jonathan said, and add a few bits of information.

Jonathan Kew a écrit :
> I believe Karl/Tomek/Norbert/somebody is planning to include a package
> of texworks sources with TL, presumably within Master/source somewhere,
> but I don't see them yet. As the actual build is done separately anyway,
> there wasn't much point in installing them early while they were still
> changing frequently...
> 
Yes, this was recently discussed internally, and this is planned.

> Only Windows and Mac (as part of the MacTeX package) binaries will be
> included with TL'09. I would encourage people to package texworks
> appropriately for Debian and other distros (some are already doing so),
> as I think that is the most sensible way to deliver it in most cases.
> 
I agree.

Stefan Löffler is already packaging TeXworks for Ubuntu, and seems open to
cooperation for a Debian package [1]. IMHO, it is much better for TeXworks in
Debian/Ubuntu to be maintened separately from TL (I mean, directly use
Jonathan's sources, the copy in TL will not be updating very often).

[1] http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/2009q2/000955.html

>> Can you point us to an older list discussion why TeXworks can't or
>> shouldn't be included in TL 2009?
> 
> I don't have a specific pointer handy, but the basic reason is the
> library dependencies; by default, texworks depends on several Qt shared
> libraries, as well as poppler, freetype, fontconfig, etc. In principle
> it should be possible to create statically-linked binaries, I believe,
> but nobody has taken on that challenge - and static-linking fontconfig,
> in my (limited) experience, is fraught with hazards. So I'm not sure how
> successful such an effort would be.
> 
A bit more details here:

http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/2009q2/000756.html

Manuel.