[tldistro] TL2008 tarball distribution

[Edd Barrett]

Hi,

Thanks to Karl for arranging the new list.

Can we discuss the format of the distfiles for TL 2008?

Here is what OpenBSD would like to see:

A folder on the ftp server containing folders of texlive releases. In
each release folder a tarball for binary sources and a tarball for the
full texmf sources.

For example

releases/
  2008/
    tl-bin-src-2008.tbz2
    tl-texmf-2008.tbz2
  2009/
    tl-bin-src-2009.tbz2
    tl-texmf-2009.tbz2

(2009 included for demonstration purposes)

Release version numbers on distfiles are very important to us, as simply
allowing old ports trees to download source.tar.bz2 can be newer (say
2008 when the port is of 2007). The build may fails and the packing list
will certainly be wrong. It's hard to explain.

Also I not that the current source.tbz2 does not create a new directory.
It untars it's guts into the cwd. Would it be a problem to have the
archive create a dir 'tl-bin-src-2008' in which is has it's contents?

Ofcourse there are hacks around this for our ports system, but I
consider it good tarball etiquette (thats a new one huh!) to create a
new dir :)

Comments and suggestions appreciated.

PS. Karl, my tl distro page for your distro page is:
http://students.dec.bmth.ac.uk/ebarrett/texlive/

It may change in the future, will let you know if it does.
(There will be downtime on my site on monday as I slide the new web
server into the racking :P Something is bound to go wrong)

Thanks

-- 

Best Regards
Edd

http://students.dec.bmth.ac.uk/ebarrett