[tex-live] Generating tex.fmt

[Frank Küster]

Ken Brooks <kenb at rpath.com> wrote:

> Karl Berry wrote:
>> Meanwhile, on a completely different front, your setup seems to have
>> much more in common with Debian than with the usual all-in-one-dir TL
>> setup.  I wonder if it would actually be easier for you to adapt
>> Debian's packages than to start from the original sources.  As I recall,
>> they had to modify a number of config files to make things work.  Frank,
>> Norbert?
>
> We considered that way back at the beginning.  Got stuck on the fact that 
> we couldn't figure out how to unpack a Debian package archive in a 
> non-Debian world.  

I don't think it's particularly useful to unpack a Debian binary
package, but this is how it goes:

mkdir some_subdir
cd some_subdir
ar x ../packagename.deb
tar -xzf data.tar.gz # and control.tar.gz if you're interested

> If anyone knows a good answer to that, I'd love to 
> hear it.  Or if anyone knows where to find the Debian package source in 
> an unpacked form.

wget http://ftp.debian.org/pool/main/t/texlive-bin/texlive-bin_2005.dfsg.1-1.diff.gz
wget http://ftp.debian.org/pool/main/t/texlive-bin/texlive-bin_2005.dfsg.1.orig.tar.gz

(or from any other mirror) and then

tar -xzf texlive-bin_2005.dfsg.1.orig.tar.gz
cd texlive-bin-2005.dfsg.1
gunzip -c ../texlive-bin_2005.dfsg.1.diff.gz | patch -p1

Alternatively, you can also just patch an empty directory with
texlive-bin_2005.dfsg.1.diff.gz.  It will only generate a debian/
subdirectory which contains the actual information, including a granular
patchset with short descriptions what the patches are intended for.

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