[tldistro] TeX Live is now in the Cygwin distro

[Norbert Preining]

Dear all,

On So, 11 Mär 2012, Ken Brown wrote:
> Thanks for the information.  I have another question.  Is it feasible  
> for a distro to make use of tlmgr.pl for certain tasks?  Here's a  

Actually, I don't think so.

> Suppose we install a package that has an "AddHyphen" command.  I gather  
> from looking at tlmgr.pl that there should be a postinstall step that  
> regenerates various language data and then runs fmtutil.  I wonder if we  
> could call "tlmgr.pl generate language" to handle the first step.  Are  
> there pitfalls here?

No, because the tlmgr.pl script reads this information from the tlpdb,
which you do not provide (AFAIS).

> I'd be interested in knowing how other distros deal with this.

Normally if you do your own splitting into packages, you *know*
at packagae build time (not package install time!) which are the
hypens and formats and maps. This information has to be saved in
some distriubtion specific way and some script (distribution specific)
has to activate that on install time.

Example in Debian for formats:
- every package that ships a format ships in effect a snippet of a
  fmtutil.cnf file in /etc/texmf/fmtutil.d/NNpackage-name.cnf
- a common package (called tex-common) is triggered when files are
  installed there (trigger mechanism in Debian) and does the following:
  . it checks that the package is fully configured
  . if yes, regenerates the fmtutil.cnf file with all the snippets
    in fmtutil.d
  . generates the new formats by running fmtutil --cnffile ../fmtutil.d/NNpackage-name.cnf
- on package removal (but not purge) the /etc/texmf/fmtutil.d/ file is left
  (requirement of Debian), but a corresponding state file in /var/...
  is deleted, so that the above mentioned script in tex-common can detect
  whether the package is actually installed or only in "removed-but-no-purged"
  state

The same is done for hyphenation patterns, but now in latest packages slightly
different for maps.

All the information are present at *package*build* time, so no need for
tlmgr at package installation time.

On So, 11 Mär 2012, Karl Berry wrote:
> The first thing tlmgr does is read texlive.tlpdb.  I didn't think of the
> distros attempted to maintain that file.  Without it, I see no way to

Can't imagine ... but possible.

> use tlmgr for anything.  Attempting to factor out or generalize things
> so as not to require tlpdb would overly complicate an already
> too-complicated program, in my opinion.  Hyphenation patterns, formats,
> maps, ... distros do their own thing for all these elements.

ANd in addition, tlmgr uses functions from TLUtils etc, so one should
actually use TLPDB->language-lines or some similar function and write
some perl code around it.

On Mo, 12 Mär 2012, pcpa at mandriva.com.br wrote:
>   All rpms I generate are from a script that parses texlive.tlpdb.
> All scripts are at
> http://svn.mandriva.com/viewvc/packages/cooker/texlive-tlpkg/current/SOURCES/
> you can checkout it with something like
> svn co http://svn.mandriva.com/svn/packages/cooker/texlive-tlpkg/current
> mandriva-texlive-tlpkg

As said, the point is at package build time all the necessary information
are here, and have to be used.

> and then files in the somewhere.d/ are concatenated by texlive.post
> before actually calling mktexlsr, updmap-sys, mtxrun and fmtutil-sys

Yes, similar system, of course, Debian complication comes from the fact
that we have to deal with user changed configuration files even after
packages have been removed-but-not-purged.

Best wishes

Norbert
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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