[tex-live] Restructuring

[Gerben Wierda]

On Mar 13, 2004, at 00:06, Fabrice Popineau wrote:

>
>> What happened to the earlier outcome of the discussion where we
>> decided to keep the stuff from the Build (make install) separate from
>> the stuff from Master?
>
> Currently, we keep texmf/ and texmf-dist/ as distinct texmf trees.

That is not what I meant.

>> Please, please keep the programs and their dependencies separate from
>> the Master texmf tree. These two (apart from major restructuring as is
>> being done now) develop rather differently (a new nehyph.tex is quite
>> something different from a new pdfetex program) and mashing them
>> together in one dir makes it very hard to set up independent updating
>> for both (especially if in both you get files dumped in the same
>> subdirectory).
>
> Ok.
>
> I think that we will have to clarify many things. There is the 
> developer
> side and the user side. We can keep things in different directories on
> the developer side. If we do it cleanly enough, we can merge our
> directories on the user side at installation time.

This would break my work completely. The reason is that I have a setup 
where I am the 'developer' for many users. My distribution mechanism is 
such that if I merge on the users side, it will be impossible for me to 
maintain and update the users installation without having to let them 
download everything when only something small has changed.

The problem is that when the stuff is merged on the users side, I 
cannot just ship mirrors of directories created on my system, my 
delivery mechanism (which uses bzipped gnutar archives) will fail.

> We just need to
> prefix paths in the tpm files by some variable :

I do not use a mechanism based on tpm files.

> $(texmfdoc)/...
> $(package)/..
> $(tlcore)/..
>
> and the installer can expand the variables with some unique location or
> chose to keep them separate.

Thatis all well and fine for CD-distribution, but my distribution is an 
internet distribution based on all of TL's programs and a subset of the 
available macros (foundation).

> Miktek layout stores binaries under texmf, and actually you can read 
> the
> TDS this way (think texmf/web2c/... and texmf/source/web2c/...). Not
> that I say it is a good idea however. I don't like it that much, but
> that could help to make 2 distributions compatible on the same machine.
>
> Anyway, I have annoyed too many people at the moment to argue about 
> this
> point. So don't worry :-)

It is not just worry. It would probably end my internet distribution 
effort completely as there would be no reasonable strategy for me 
(afaics) to keep it maintained.

G