Re: tetex rpm's

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 09:24 +0000, Jan Sundermeyer wrote:

> > 
> Are you aware that Miktex provides the whole package infrastructure.
> The miktex maintainer has recently ported his package manager to linux and it 
> works pretty well.
> Furthermore the package repository is excellently maintained.
> 

Yes - I am aware of the MikTeX port.
I think it is a good solution for maintaining stuff in a local user
texmf when you don't have root.

On Windows (and Mac OS for that matter), there is not a good package
management system that can keep track of all the software available
globally. There is Windows Update, but that is only available to MS
applications.

On Linux, there are several good package management systems - RPM is one
of them - that can control every aspect of the software installed on the
system.

Some tex related packages depend on on tex packages. fontools for
example needs lcdf-typetools and some perl stuff. RPM can manage those
as dependencies, and pull them in for the user when the user uses yum or
apt to install tetex-fontools.

You can run yum/apt as services that automatically update all software
on your system, exiting and doing nothing if dependency breakage would
result, etc. - and you do not need to use different tools for different
software sets in order to keep everything at patch level - provided you
stick with rpm to do so.

When you start using other things (like cpan for perl, etc.) - unless
they interact with the rpm database, they can't properly ensure that
dependencies are met that are outside the scope of their immediate
purpose (can MikTeX install perl modules for latex packages that use
perl?).

MikTeX may be a better solution for some people, I prefer to keep things
simple and use one package management system.

As far as MikTeX being excellently maintained - I don't doubt that.
That's good, and it is important to me as well, which is why I've got a
cron job that logs onto the ctan ftp site and does a modtime on the src
zip files. If they are different than what I've packaged, I get
notification. I'm guessing MikTeX does a similar thing.

Anyway, this is tetex list - not comp.advocate.rpm - so I'll shut up.
Point is there is more than one way to do things, I personally prefer
not to mix lots of different package managers - when there is one that
is quite capable of doing the job for the desktop platform I have
chosen. The only issue is that distribution packager tend to use large
packages for teTeX, and they aren't going to push 100MB of updates
(about what results from building the tetex src.rpm) just because a
couple .sty files have had bugs fixed.

Perl and Python etc. are done in a much more modular way, allowing
smaller updates of the components - teTeX probably should have been done
that way, but it wasn't. One big src.rpm. Fortunately modular updates
are possible. MikTeX is one solution, but RPM (imho) is a better one, at
least for RPM based distributions.