[tldistro] [tlbuild] patches for TeX Live

[Robby Workman]

On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Karl Berry wrote:

>    But I certainly egree with you, that taking a random SVN snapshot for a
>    distro build might not be the best possible choice.
>
> I would put it much more strongly: a a random snapshot is most
> definitely *not* the best possible choice -- or a good choice at all.
> Such a choice does a disservice to the people who actually want to use
> TeX.


Agreed.  Unless I'm missing something obvious, that's one of the 
three choices that distros have though:

1) ship the release (e.g. TL-2011), and then try to dig through svn
    logs for patches that might fix various issues, but note that
    this is *really* painful  </whine whine whine>

2) test (and potentially ship) a snapshot at some later date in hopes
    that it fixes earlier bugs without introducing even more than that

3) ship the release tarballs and then leave them alone and hope for
    the best

Okay, so I'm almost surely missing a good option there, but the point
is that a patch branch would allow distros to have a large degree of
assurance that they're only getting bugfixes when they update.  Of 
course, nothing is certain, but you get the idea.

Again though, I have no illusions that this comes without cost; it's
going to create more work for somebody (probably several somebodies),
so that/those somebodies are the ones who should decide.

-RW