[gentoo-dev] Upcoming LyX ebuild - design questions

[gentoo-dev] Upcoming LyX ebuild - design questions

[Dan Armak]

Hi all,

I'm about to post my LyX ebuild, which depends on the gv and Xaw3d ebuilds I 
posted earlier.

There are however some design questions I'd like to clear up first:

LyX is a word processor based on LaTeX, a very good one IMHO. LyX can make 
use of a great number of packages, but it can also do withuot them. Which of 
the following package groups should the LyX ebuild depend on?

1. Absolutely necessary packages: x11 & gtk.
2. latex2e and a few other things, all of which are in tetex. Lyx can build 
and run without these, but it'd be just a flashy text editor without any 
output capabilities.
3. Important utilities like ghostscipt and gv, to use for viewing your output.
4. A _very_ large amount of third-party exporters, importers, converters and 
viewers. Enables you to output in many formats etc.
5. A few misc tex packages like the one for Hebrew support (which I use) that 
aren't included in tetex.

Which of these should the ebuild force (i.e. DEPEND on)?

An idea: building a lyx-base ebuild which only depends on x11/gtk and a lyx 
ebuild which does nothing but depends on lyx-bsae, tetex and everything else. 
Maybe with another in-between stage (i.e. a lyx-utils ebuild).

What do you think?

----

Another issue: whould Lyx go into app-text (as a latex frontend) or into 
app-office (as a word processor)?

----

And finally: does anybody here except myself use LyX? Because I can't 
understand how such a great distro cold live so long without this 
all-important package. :-)



Dan

Re: [gentoo-dev] Upcoming LyX ebuild - design questions

[Terje Kvernes]

Dan Armak <ermak@netvision.net.il> writes:

> An idea: building a lyx-base ebuild which only depends on x11/gtk
> and a lyx ebuild which does nothing but depends on lyx-bsae, tetex
> and everything else. Maybe with another in-between stage (i.e. a
> lyx-utils ebuild).

  this is generally what I prefer. something like "lyx" does
  everything, if you want specifics, then you do "lyx-base",
  "lyx-viewers", "lyx-output", "lyx-util-<foo>", lyx-util-<bar>" etc.
  is there any easy way of making a ebuild depend on "lyx-*"? :-)
 
> What do you think?

  I think you're doing a great job tossing ebuilds at us. ,-) 

> Another issue: whould Lyx go into app-text (as a latex frontend) or into 
> app-office (as a word processor)?

  gaaah. app-office IMHO. it has enough WYSIWYG-ideas for it to be
  classifiable as a word processor.
 
> And finally: does anybody here except myself use LyX? Because I
> can't understand how such a great distro cold live so long without
> this all-important package. :-)

  emacs, tex-mode, latex. I've never had the use for LyX. ;-)

-- 
Terje

Re: [gentoo-dev] Upcoming LyX ebuild - design questions

[Daniel Robbins]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2001 at 02:29:49PM +0300, Dan Armak wrote:

> 1. Absolutely necessary packages: x11 & gtk.
> 2. latex2e and a few other things, all of which are in tetex. Lyx can build 
> and run without these, but it'd be just a flashy text editor without any 
> output capabilities.
> 3. Important utilities like ghostscipt and gv, to use for viewing your output.
> 4. A _very_ large amount of third-party exporters, importers, converters and 
> viewers. Enables you to output in many formats etc.
> 5. A few misc tex packages like the one for Hebrew support (which I use) that 
> aren't included in tetex.

Well, have it depend on 1, 2 and 3.  We want the base install of our packages
to be fully-functional, and tetex and ghostscript and a postscript viewer would
be needed to actually use Lyx for anything useful.

I'm hoping that the things in 4 and 5 can be built as separate packages rather
than being included in the main Lyx package.  If this is possible, that's what
I would recommend as well.

> Which of these should the ebuild force (i.e. DEPEND on)?
> 
> An idea: building a lyx-base ebuild which only depends on x11/gtk and a lyx 
> ebuild which does nothing but depends on lyx-bsae, tetex and everything else. 
> Maybe with another in-between stage (i.e. a lyx-utils ebuild).
> 
> What do you think?

A good solution, since it gives our users more flexibility.

> ----
> 
> Another issue: whould Lyx go into app-text (as a latex frontend) or into 
> app-office (as a word processor)?
> 
> ----

I'd put it in app-text.

> And finally: does anybody here except myself use LyX? Because I can't 
> understand how such a great distro cold live so long without this 
> all-important package. :-)

Well, that's why we're glad that you're around :))

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.