Re: new teTeX beta (20040208)

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

>>>>>>"Tim" == Tim Waugh <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> 
>     > On Sun, Feb 08, 2004 at 11:52:13PM +0100, Thomas Esser wrote:
>     >> After a long time without a published beta or stable release, I
>     >> am very please to make this announce.
> 
>     > I think the answer is 'no', but just to clarify:
> 
>     > Are distributions (such as Fedora Core) meant to pick this up?
>     > In other words, will there be complaints if they stick to 2.0.2
>     > in preference to this?
> 
> Your question sounds a bit polemic.
> 
> There is a simple rule:
> Use the latest stable release.  If you think it's too old then contact
> Thomas Esser.
> 
> At the moment therte is no reason to put the latest beta into a Linux
> release.  Thomas' announcement came with a huge change log.  If you
> read it carefully you will see that some of the interna had been
> changed, most things are not visible to a user.
> 
> BTW., Linux distributors usually split teTeX into packages.  I don't
> think that anybody is able to do this reliably unless he is a TeX guru
> or something like that.
> 
> Recently a friend of mine had a problem (not RedHat specific).  He
> installed all the packages except context.  The problem is that if you

which distro?

> use LaTeX and Metapost, you need at least two files which are part of
> context.

what are such files? In Mandrake context was splitten to tetex-context
reduce the number of dependencies. E.g. context was having
scripts which were requiring perl-Tk.

> 
> I don't use one of the mainstream Linux distributions, so I don't know
> how they split teTeX into pieces.  I even don't know why.

I agree with you that a huge tetex package is better than smaller ones,
but often tetex packages in a distro are splitten into smaller
package units to reduce the number of package dependencies, so to let for
instance users also have a minimal installation. For instance in tetex there
is also "mf-nowin". You may wonder what is needed for since there
is already mf. "mf" is the binary version where output in proof mode
is also shown in a graphical window, and is linked against X11 libraries.
Having a basic tetex package containing mf-nowin
and not mf, would help for instance to reduce the number of dependencies: e.g.
you may install a basic tetex without install all the X11 and X11 libraries. Or
for instance consider the case where one not really uses tetex because
he doesn't even know what is, but for instance he is compiling a program
which, for building documentation, needs pdftex and texinfo. He could install
only a basic subset without having to install everything.

> 
> There is plenty of disk space for KDE and Gnome...
> 

even KDE and Gnome are splitten into thousands of library
and subpackages, that I have even lost to count them... :-)

Bye.
Giuseppe.