Re: tetex rpm's

On Thu, 2006-02-02 at 21:26 +0000, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:

> 
> 
> This is not necessarily a big deal. TeX is large, but not that
> complex, and without that many dependencies. It is in general
> rather self-contained. Yes, you need need the obvious libc stuff,
> and pdftex needs zlib and libpng, but there isn't a lot else.
> Obviously, 99% of a TeX system is system independent anyway.
> 
> Still, there may of course be hidden nasties.

Correct - most tex packages would only depend upon other tex packages,
and some of those dependencies I don't want to force - for example, if
something depends upon something in the LaTeX "required" group, such as
psnfss, chances are that the psnfss aleady on the users system is good
enough - and forcing install of the alternative packaging (even if it
happens to be newer than what is in teTeX 3) is a waste of disk space on
the users system.

However - source rpms should imho always be made available for any open
source project packages as an rpm. That's particularly important here.

Say I want the texmf tree un /mnt/nfs/texmf so that it can be shared
over NFS to many systems. That's possible with src.rpms by simply
rebuilding them.

In ~/.rpmmacros :

%_rpmtexmf      /mnt/nfs/texmf

Then rebuild all the src.rpms - and the resulting rpms will install
everything into /mnt/nfs/texmf instead of /usr/share/texmf-rpm

That way you can keep the packages up to date and managed via rpm on
your NFS server, and the tree can be mounted wherever your clients mount
the nfs share.