[tex-live] TeX Live RPM for Red Hat RHEL5?

[MARTIN, GEORGE H, ATTSI]

Thank you, George.
I've also thanked other responders individually.
I appreciate all the guidance. 
I'll try Red Hat, and probably try a build from source and see how bad it is.
I'll check the references below as well.  

--
George Martin
AT&T Services, Inc.
732-368-2985
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: George N. White III [mailto:gnwiii at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 6:29 AM
To: MARTIN, GEORGE H, ATTSI
Cc: tex-live at tug.org
Subject: Re: [tex-live] TeX Live RPM for Red Hat RHEL5?

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:06 PM, MARTIN, GEORGE H, ATTSI <georgemartin at att.com> wrote:

> Is there by any chance a TeX Live RPM available for Red Hat Linux 
> RHEL5, or perhaps a Fedora Core (6?) RPM that will install on RHEL5?

There are Fedora 9--11 rpm packages for tl2007, but for RHEL5 you may have to build them from source, see <http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5402>.
Some centos users build texlive rpms:

<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-July/061620.html>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Centos/5/i386/kups/SRPMS/>

The drawbacks to creating texlive rpms for RHEL5:

a.  other RHEL5 packages probably depend on teTeX.  If you install
TL2008 using the
generic installer, you can keep tetex for RH package dependencies, and control which version is used by adjusting the PATH variable.

b.  the .spec files will probably need tweaks for RHEL5, and there may be some issues
with older versions of libraries.   The generic binaries from generic
texlive are statically
linked as much as practical, so you avoid some issues with library versions.
<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-July/061024.html>
indicates that Fedora
texlive depends on libpoppler, etc.

c.  rpm default requires installing and configuring as root -- texlive configuration scripts are much too complex to be trusted.

d.  the existing rpm's are all for tl2007, so you miss out on all the progress in tl2008, including the package manager

--
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia