[tex-live] teTeX: no next release

[Michael Peters]

On Monday, May 22, 2006, at 02:53AM, Thomas Esser <te at dbs.uni-hannover.de> wrote:

>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.

*snip*

>
>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.

I've started an rpm specific package repository, which is at http://www.tetexrpm.org/ for the noarch texmf stuff. Just recently, sourceforge approved the project for housing the rpm spec files there - project name is tetexrpm. I have not uploaded any files yet, but the point of using sourceforge is to make it easy for other people to contribute by adding/updating the spec files for the individual macro packages from CTAN.

If there is any interest whatsoever from people on this list helping out with that, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm certainly open to changing how things are done in tetexrpm if there is a need to do so.

perhaps the binary parts of tetex can be packaged in rpm from TeX Live, and the texmf as rpms from the CTAN .zip files. Something similar to tetex could then be achieved via yum/apt groups so that a groupinstall can pull in the necessary macro packages.

Thoughts comments?