[tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter

[George N. White III]

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 5:46 AM, Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi Karl,
>
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 05:20:12PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>> Hi Jindrich,
>>
>>     collection-graphicstools
>>     - caused by missing bin-pngtools for all Unix-like arches
>>     collection-xetex
>>     - caused by missing xecyr package for Unix-like arches
>>
>> Can't you just consider them empty packages when they are for Windows
>> only?  That is what we do, more or less.
>
> The problem is that there is "depend xecyr.ARCH" in section related to
> xecyr in the texlive.tlpdb so there is no way for a dependency
> resolver to figure out the package is available solely for win32.
> Replacing it with "depend xecyr.win32" will solve it.
>
> The similar case is collection-wintools. It is for win32 arch exclusively but
> there is no way to find it out. Is it possible to add something like
> "exclusivearch win32" or similar to such packages to reflect they are
> useless for other arches? Currently I have it manually blacklisted.
>
>> (The existence of xecyr is a mistake, by the way.  I'll fix that eventually.)
>>
>>     what prevented me to include scheme-gust, scheme-full and
>>     scheme-medium so they are excluded from the above lists.
>>
>> I'm not sure what role schemes play in your rpm world, if any, but in
>> principle scheme-full is very important!  It is, in fact, the default as
>> far as our "native" installation goes and I hope installing everything
>> will be the default for Fedora too.
>
> The schemes are generated from metadata from TeX Live so they are
> basically the same. I agree that including scheme-full is essential,
> but I'm not sure whether it should be default for the downstream
> packaging. Initially I thought that scheme-basic will suffice. The
> reason for it is that not everybody needs full TeX Live installation
> and also many programs have build dependencies to TeX Live just to
> build documentation. So installing scheme-full to fullfil that seems a
> waste of resources to me. On the other hand, user who wants a full
> TeX Live installation could have it via "yum instal
> texlive-scheme-full". Are you ok with it?

The real "waste of resources" is not the extra network bandwidth and disk space
of installing a whack of extra packages, it is the future costs of having
documentation that fails to compile due to reliance on macro packages, etc.
that didn't stand the test of time.  Document writers, who are often only
vaguely familiar with TeX and don't want to learn more than is
necessary to get the document written, will encounter some formatting
problem and seek advice
from the web or a colleague who uses LaTeX for papers.

The problem with using texlive-scheme-full for situations where you are
only building documentation is that people will not be discouraged from
using packages which may not be supported in the long run.  There
needs to be a scheme which has essentially the capabilities of teTeX,
and which includes only well-supported packages that are expected to
be available over the long term.

Having a scheme-basic will tend to ensure that the contents are widely
used and will create some interest in seeing that the functionality is
still available in TL2032, so to some extent you don't have to predict
which packages will endure -- just choose a set that gives the
functionality required for documentation and basic reports and articles.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia