[tldistro] Packaging challenges

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Vladimír,

> unpacking individual packages according to scheme/collection choice
> (because the whole texmf tarball is huge). Building the sources seems
> working well and I extract info I need from texlive.tpldb.

This is exactely what I am doing in Debian, and I think this is a quite
reasonable decision.

> (1) the binaries seem to require mktexlsr.pl but I can't see it in the
> individual packages (only the big texmf tarball). What am I doing wrong?

mktexlsr.pl is in the package 'tetex' (strange, but ok, forget about this
for the moment). What you actually want to say is that 
	fmtutil requires mktexlsr.pl
and here we go to your second questions:

> Moreover, there are some collisions between what the source build
> installs and some files from individual packages -- it's unclear to me
> which is preferable.

individual packages. THey should be the same, but from my own experience
of 10+ years of packaging TeX Live for Debian, I suggest you to
prefer the files from the individual packages.

But I have to agree, that is not a trivial thing, due to the following
reasons:
* many "binaries" installed by the sources are actual links to
  scripts in texmf-dist
* some links are genrated by texlinks or in one way or the other
It is not trivial - I suggest to do what is best for you, I just
say what we are doing in Debian: There we have a trigger
mechanism, which forwards any necessary actions to texlvie-base
(which correspnds to collection-base). And only if that is installed
(and thus also mktexlsr.pl and fmtutil.pl etc etc), only then all
the commands for updating the formats and maps are called.

Don't underestimate the work, and please feel free to ask me
any question that comes to your mind, but try to be as specific
as possible.

Of course, feel free to peek into the Debian packaging, all in
git, that does all that.

Now for the other question set:

> (2) we would probably prefer to use packages yearly releases instead of
> following everyday updates; there is
> ftp://tug.ctan.org/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/2015/tlnet-final/
> but I don't see it mirrored. Would you consider changing that? We

If your distribution does not provide mirror facilities, then you
are out of luck. The historic part will not be mirrored, as it
is too big, considering several releases etc.

This is up to your distribution to care for these kind of things.

But then, I am not a CTAN maintainer - and I guess there is *none* 
on this list who is a CTAN maintainer, so this questions is 
actually posed in the wrong place.

All the best

Norbert

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PREINING, Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0  ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
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