[tex-live] Integrating vanilla TeX Live with Debian

[simon at getthingsfixed.co.uk]

On Wednesday 12 September 2012 23:33:15 Norbert Preining wrote:
> On Di, 11 Sep 2012, simon at getthingsfixed.co.uk wrote:
> > Are the instructions in the debian page[1] correct?
>
> Depending on what part of it.
>
> > The texlive-local does not seen to do much. Shouldn't it suppress
> > synaptic/... from wanting/allowing the installation of the distro's
> > packages?
>
> Not necessarily.

What is it supposed to do then?

Isn't it supposed to prevent one from inadvertently stomping on the tl 
packages?

> > Would it not be better if there was a utility that can nose the dpkg tree
> > for texlive and use that to build the texlive-local?
>
> Well, one can, but nobody has written it up. Something in the lines of
>
> apt-cache show texlive-full | grep Depends
> then massage the output by removing the versions, and some external
> packages not shipped in TUG TeX Live
> also check for recommends and suggests, ...
> and from this generate the list of package names that should be provided.
>
> So yes, one can do it ...

Tried it and then spotted that it trawls for lots more packages that 
definitely aren't part of texlive. The obvious ones I can write a fixup table 
to zap them before outputting the final texlive-local. But some might miss, 
so it would be in the final file.

The problem would seem to be that whilst we can traverse the dependency tree 
using apt-cache, but have no way of knowing what is actually on the DVD. This 
is because the names and contents of the distro's packages can't be 
guaranteed to line up with what they might be called in the DVD.


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Get Things Fixed