Re: [gentoo-dev] Future of tetex

["Marcus D. Hanwell" <cryos@gentoo.org>]

Martin Ehmsen wrote:
> This is sad because teTeX always has been a very stable (if you consider
> the mess a TeX distribution normally is). There is a reason why teTeX
> has been the default TeX distribution on almost every flavor of Linux.
> 
> But it also means that we (Gentoo) should make the transition to TeXLive
> (Debian is doing the same thing, and possible many other distributions).
> But that leaves us with several problems/questions which needs to be
> solved/answered (see below).

I use LaTeX quite extensively in my work. Time allowing I would be happy
to help out more and provide testing on ~amd64. I am currently writing
up my thesis so I could test it out with that!
> 
> Now for the exciting (but time consuming) news:
> 
> The road to a stable TeXLive in Gentoo:
> 
> 1. Stabilize tetex-3.0_p1[3]. We are almost done, there are very few
> real bugs left, and tetex-3.0_p1 is already much more stable than
> tetex-2 ever was. I hope this will happen in the next month.

This is long overdue - again if I can help please let me know. I use
this all the time and have been doing so for the last year. Do you have
a stabilisation tracker bug set up for this yet?
> 
> 3. Create a TeXLive ebuild and put it onto ~arch and have ~arch user
> switch over.
> This requires us to figure out how to create a texmf-tree. In the past
> Thomas Esser created a very solid (although containing rather old
> versions) texmf-tree with packages taken from ctan[5].
> There are several possibilities:
> 3.1 Create our own texmf-tree (can largely be automated by scripting).
> 3.2 Use MikTeX package manager[6] which was ported to Linux.
> 3.3 Use something similar to the g-cpan.pl script used by perl, to
> install packages from ctan[7].
> I haven't evaluated the possibilities yet, but comments are more than
> welcome!
> 
I would favour option 3.1 personally, and it would be great to keep our
LaTeX packages more up to date as I sometimes have to manually update
these packages.

> 4. Mark TeXLive stable and kick teTeX from the tree.
> Here we are talking at least a year into the future (unless text-markup
> suddenly gets flooded by new devs).
> 
> In the process of creating a TeXLive ebuild I am thinking about making
> it much more modular (which seems to be _the_ buzz word at the moment :)
> At least I would like to split the TeX source and texmf-tree into
> separate ebuilds (no matter what the texmf-tree might look like, see above).
> Other possibilities are creating separate ebuilds for most of the
> TeXLive distribution, like pdftex, kpathsea, dvipdf*, ... This would
> make it much easier for us to locate bugs and fix them, but requires
> much more initial work (this actual resembles the creation of our own
> TeX distribution).

It would be great to see a more modular approach to LaTeX, allowing fine
grained control, bug fixing and a more up to date installation.
> 
> Comments, suggestions, offers of help, anything would be useful :)

Time allowing I would be willing to help out with the migration and
stabilisation on amd64 at least (I am part of that arch team). My group
uses tetex-3 and we have had very few issues.

Thanks for putting the work in - big changes to LaTeX in Linux!

Thanks,

Marcus
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