[tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Thu Aug 21 23:37:26 CEST 2008


    I agree that including scheme-full is essential, but I'm not sure
    whether it should be default for the downstream packaging.
    Initially I thought that scheme-basic will suffice. The reason for
    it is that not everybody needs full TeX Live installation and also
    many programs have build dependencies to TeX Live just to build
    documentation. 

Sure, I understand.

    So installing scheme-full to fullfil that seems a waste of resources
    to me.
    
Perhaps the ideal would be for those packages that use TeX for
documentation to depend not just on "TeX Live" in general, but to a
texlive-scheme-basic, texlive-scheme-medium, or whatever they actually
need.  Not that that's easy, I know ...

And anyway, don't they really depend only on texlive if someone wants to
*build* the documentation -- as opposed to just read it?  Hopefully
those other programs provide prebuilt pdf/html/whatever.  Seems like
building the doc would be relatively rare.

    On the other hand, user who wants a full
    TeX Live installation could have it via "yum instal
    texlive-scheme-full". Are you ok with it?

Well, I'm certainly not in a position to insist on anything.  Neither
choice stands out as obviously superior to me.

With scheme-basic as the default, I suspect most people who actually
want to use TeX (for anything) will be frustrated, since very little of
what they expect will be installed, while others will happily figure out
the yum invocation above.

Conversely, with scheme-full as the default, some people who just want
to install the other programs will be frustrated at the waste of disk
space and/or bandwidth, while others have plenty of disk and aren't
bothered to have it all.

It seems there is no way to please everyone.  What I can report is that
during those many years when the distros were still based on teTeX, and
teTeX was (essentially) not being updated, there was massive confusion
among TeX users that packages and programs that had been available for
years were not installed on their brand new system.  This isn't quite
the same situation, I know, since at least the material will be up to
date if they figure out how to install it, but it does seem reminiscient ...

Best,
karl


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