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

[Jindrich Novy]

Hi Karl,

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 04:37:26PM -0500, Karl Berry wrote:
>     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. 
> 
> Sure, I understand.
> 
>     So installing scheme-full to fullfil that seems a waste of resources
>     to me.
>     
> Perhaps the ideal would be for those packages that use TeX for
> documentation to depend not just on "TeX Live" in general, but to a
> texlive-scheme-basic, texlive-scheme-medium, or whatever they actually
> need.  Not that that's easy, I know ...
> 
> And anyway, don't they really depend only on texlive if someone wants to
> *build* the documentation -- as opposed to just read it?  Hopefully
> those other programs provide prebuilt pdf/html/whatever.  Seems like
> building the doc would be relatively rare.
> 
>     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?
> 
> Well, I'm certainly not in a position to insist on anything.  Neither
> choice stands out as obviously superior to me.
> 
> With scheme-basic as the default, I suspect most people who actually
> want to use TeX (for anything) will be frustrated, since very little of
> what they expect will be installed, while others will happily figure out
> the yum invocation above.
> 
> Conversely, with scheme-full as the default, some people who just want
> to install the other programs will be frustrated at the waste of disk
> space and/or bandwidth, while others have plenty of disk and aren't
> bothered to have it all.
> 
> It seems there is no way to please everyone.  What I can report is that
> during those many years when the distros were still based on teTeX, and
> teTeX was (essentially) not being updated, there was massive confusion
> among TeX users that packages and programs that had been available for
> years were not installed on their brand new system.  This isn't quite
> the same situation, I know, since at least the material will be up to
> date if they figure out how to install it, but it does seem reminiscient ...
> 

Indeed, I remember these times. teTeX was usable TeX distribution but
a composition of styles/packages and language supports in it was a big
mistery for me and many people didn't understand why a particular
style or language support is in or is missing. Thomas definitely had a
system in it while putting teTeX together but since TeX Live has now
usability-focused and very well designed packaging system I hope the
problems are more or less history thanks to you.

I hope most of the TeX users will figure out how to install a missing
part even though scheme-basic would be the default. They can use yum
to search what is missing and I will make the Fedora users aware of
that in an announcement after 2008 is packaged and released.

Thanks,
Jindrich

-- 
Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com>   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/