[tex-live] Re: Debian-TeXlive Proposal II

[Frank Küster]

Gerben Wierda <Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl> schrieb:

> On Jan 26, 2005, at 22:10, Karl Berry wrote:
>
>>> Since I didn't see any sense in TEXMFDIST for a Debian package[1], I
>>> was inclined not to use it, but keep all files in TEXMFMAIN (plus the
>>> generated ones in VARTEXMF). I think we should coordinate on this.
>>
>>     Karl, Sebastian, what do you mean?
>>
>> I think TL should follow teTeX.  There are a lot of trees now, for
>> various reasons.
>>
>> As far as TEXMFDIST goes -- Frank, its purpose, as Fabrice envisioned
>> it, is not to be "replaced completely with a new tarball".  It's to
>> provide files which are distribution-independent.  That (in principle)
>> MiKTeX and XEmTeX and teTeX and ... could share.
>
> For me, the main goal for texmf and texmf-dist separation is to make
> separate updates of the TeX programs (say a new pdftex appears) and
> the basic tree wiith packages, styles, fonts, etc. If the programs
> change, some parts of texmf change as well (e.g. .pool files), while
> the texmf tree is more or less independent of the version of programs
> you are using.

This is clear, but it is also clear that this rationale does not hold
any more if one is using a package manager (like dpkg for *deb's, or
probably also something else for rpm's) that keeps track of every
file. If you upgrade the texlive Debian package that contains pdftex, it
will only replace the files in the common TEXMF tree that it installed,
and leave the others alone.

I do not suggest that tex-live drop the separation of TEXMFDIST and
TEXMFMAIN generally. I only suggested that the _Debian_ packages of
tex-live and of teTeX do it the same way, and I would drop the
separation. After all, it's just a question of removing one entry from
TEXMF = ..., and of creating the package in a particular way.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer