[tldistro] Packaging challenges

[Vladimír Čunát]

On 08/25/2015 04:44 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
>> (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

Oh, now I see it *is* contained in the *latest* tetex tarball. I was
only searching those in 2015/tlnet-final, assuming that it's best to use
all parts from the latest ("stable"/yearly) release to avoid problems
from hidden inter-dependencies, but evidently there's a "bug" in 2015.

>> 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.
> [...]
> 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.

OK, thanks. I will ask when I feel I'm missing some crucial information
not specific to our Nix case. The post-install actions seem the only
complex thing to do.

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

I had looked into various distro approaches; Fedora was quite
interesting as well as Debian.

Originally I thought I would use TL collections as the atomic packages,
reading an older paper of yours claiming it was a partition of the TL
packages, but then I realized the collections overlap non-trivially
nowadays, which would lead to waste of space. Therefore, I'm now using
the granularity of TL packages, and collections/schemes act as sets of
those (similarly to what Fedora does).

>> (2) 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
> 
> This is up to your distribution to care for these kind of things.

I had hoped (some) yearly releases of sources might be distributed by
upstream (meaning CTAN) as in most "standard packages". It's good to
know the state.


Vladimir


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