Packaging designed by the TeX community (was: new teTeX beta (20040208))

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 02:32:09AM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 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.

I agree, teTeX is a very big system and packaging needs expert
knowledge, that only few have.

> Recently a friend of mine had a problem (not RedHat specific).  He
> installed all the packages except context.  The problem is that if you
> use LaTeX and Metapost, you need at least two files which are part of
> context.

Would it make sense to launch a small packaging tetex project, that
would design the possible segmentation and cross-dependencies of teTeX
components? The results could be used by rpm/deb packagers to various
degrees of granularity according to the distribution's policy.

> 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.

There are some reasons, the dependencies on perl, perl-Tk and the
texinfo etxraction have already been raised here. For my personal use
I prefer a complete teTeX setup, but for packaging projects requiring
only docbook support while building in chroots, having all of teTeX as
a build requirement is quite a big overhead.
-- 
[email protected]

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