[OS X TeX] [Fwd: teTeX: no next release]

[Gerben Wierda]

Thomas Esser has announced the end of teTeX as a separate TeX
distribution. See below. I am pre-empting discussion here.

The TeX i-Package is based on teTeX for its main texmf tree. I have not
drawn definitive conclusions about what this means for the TeX i-Package.
Unless I find a low-energy way (e.g. someone to develop this for me) of
extracting a teTeX-like texmf tree and updating the TeX i-Packages from
TeX Live I could be forced to end my own redistribution as well. Apple's
problems with the OS does not help either, nor does the fact that this
coincides with TeX Live's move from perforce to svn as versioning system.

Another option for the texmf tree is the MikTeX Package Manager (mpm), but
as far as I know, that also relies on a single person to edit the MikTeX
repository and that has obvious drawbacks (even if the editing is good).
As it is now, I only see TeX Live as a viable source.

I'll keep all of you posted.

G

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: teTeX: no next release
From:    "Thomas Esser" <te at dbs.uni-hannover.de>
Date:    Mon, May 22, 2006 10:38
To:      tetex at dbs.uni-hannover.de
         tetex-pretest at dbs.uni-hannover.de
         tetex-announce at dbs.uni-hannover.de
Cc:      tex-live at tug.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

In the past, preparing a release ment to spend all my spare time for
about 2-3 month on getting the release out (in addition to doing regular
updates on yources and the texmf tree). The time spend on it increased
with the size of the distribution.

My current development tree (just as it is today) is available from
  rsync://tug.org/tetexdevsrc/
so if anybody wants to pick it up, just do it.

Basically, teTeX consists of a source tree and a texmf tree with fonts,
macros, configuration, etc.

The source tree of teTeX-3.0 is included 100% in TeX Live
(http://www.tug.org/texlive/) which is released once per year. So,
there is no doubt for me that all the stuff that is now included in the
source tarball will be maintained actively. There are some parts which
have been originally written by me (scripts such as updmap, texconfig,
fmtutil) and I think that it won't be a problem for me to continue to
maintain these things (and submit updates into the TeX Live repository).

The texmf tree of teTeX is a monolitic distribution of individual CTAN
packages. I am unsure if someone else wants to maintain such a monolitic
monster package. I am sure that it would be much better to set up a
package based infrastructure, such as MikTeX's. This infrastructure was
recently ported to Linux, so using this might be a good start. Another
possible source of information about creating TeX packages is again TeX
Live. The work done there can be used to create debian packages in a
mostly automated way.

All the best,

Thomas

PS: Follow-Up set to tetex at dbs.uni-hannover.de.



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