From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from lists.gentoo.org ([140.105.134.102] helo=robin.gentoo.org) by nuthatch.gentoo.org with esmtp (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1FjdS2-0001Pa-C6 for garchives@archives.gentoo.org; Fri, 26 May 2006 14:38:06 +0000 Received: from robin.gentoo.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.6/8.13.6) with SMTP id k4QEbDkA019201; Fri, 26 May 2006 14:37:13 GMT Received: from platinum.cryos.net (platinum.cryos.net [195.242.214.61]) by robin.gentoo.org (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id k4QEZAJT018546 for ; Fri, 26 May 2006 14:35:10 GMT Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by platinum.cryos.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5A3BAB6976 for ; Fri, 26 May 2006 15:35:09 +0100 (BST) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at cryos.net Received: from platinum.cryos.net ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (platinum.cryos.net [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id CB5+FDvucTdI for ; Fri, 26 May 2006 15:35:00 +0100 (BST) Received: from [192.168.10.10] (router.cryos.net [217.155.144.222]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by platinum.cryos.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 39246B693D for ; Fri, 26 May 2006 15:35:00 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: <44771213.7070205@gentoo.org> Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 15:34:59 +0100 From: "Marcus D. Hanwell" User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (X11/20060517) Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Reply-to: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org MIME-Version: 1.0 To: gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Future of tetex References: <4476E035.3080207@gentoo.org> In-Reply-To: <4476E035.3080207@gentoo.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.94.0.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Archives-Salt: 6afd2cd9-62b1-461e-901e-321f5f7fab15 X-Archives-Hash: 5f65ea473008e933222e70062c93f306 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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list