[tex-live] Matching TL package setups to my own

[Frank Küster]

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

> Maybe I should explain what I am trying to do and what this (imo)
> means for this stuff in TL
>
> My current redistribution packs up a part of TL's Master tree  in
> .tar.bz2 files to be downloaded by i-Installer (chunks). These  chunks
> can be rather large. E.g. a subset of TL's texmf-dist  corresponing to
> the former teTeX texmf tree + what I used to add to  that from TL. To
> make it possible for the user to minimize the  download/footprint I do
> not pack the texmf*/source stuff and I split  the texmf-dist tree in a
> chunk containing the  selections from texmf- 
> dist/doc, texmf-dist/tex, texmf-dist/ftonts and the rest of my
> selection from texmf-dist. I do this so that if only a package in tex/
> latex changes, the whole fonts business does not need to be
> downloaded again when the i-Package is updated. I also separate doc
> for the rest as you do not need doc to run TeX.

That sounds very much like the goals we try to follow with Debian
TeXLive packages.

> I still want the user to be able to select something high-level, like
> scheme-tetex.
> I want the use to be able to select collections and packages

We decided that for Debian, only collections (and some special "schemes"
similar to scheme-tetex) can be selected, not individual packages.  But
that's only because of, let's say internal, Debian-specific problems.

> I want the user to be able to choose to not install doc or source
> until needed (which is almost never)

Hm, I'd rather say in the parentheses "which should be almost always",
because without installed documentation people start googling (and
finding outdated/wrong advice) instead of reading, but we also want to
provide the option not to install docs.  Note, however, that some
packages require to be distributed as a whole - so installing the docs
should at least be the default.

> And most certainly I want the build process from TLP to i-Package to
> be automatic. If too much hand fiddling is required there is no way I
> can keep that up.

Definitely, just as creating Debian packages from TLP.

Sorry that I can't comment on the technical details at the moment.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)