TeX Live 2008/9 packaging and you

[Jindrich Novy]

Hi all,

sorry for long mail. I thought it's a good idea to catch up with you
guys before I update to the new TeX Live in rawhide and discuss possible
problems. To make really long story short, the new TeX Live comes with
a huge set of subpackages (about 4000) so what I want to ask you if it
will just slow down yum and general updating terribly or is it
generally acceptable? (considering the metadata size growth?)


For more details please read this (to-be) announcement:

I finally manage to package the whole TeX Live 2008 distribution
including binaries coming from the actual 2009 TeX Live development tree:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=1382525

Not only that it uses the latest rpm features such as:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/NoarchSubpackages

but it comes with improved packaging scheme generated from TeX Live
upstream packaging metadata with emphasis on future maintainability in
Fedora 12+.


Let me compare the new and previous version:

Old version texlive-2007 (currently in f9, f10, f11):

* three main package trees:
  - texlive, arch dependent, 13 packages / 7 MiB
  - texlive-texmf, noarch, 9 packages / 274 MiB
  - texlive-texmf-errata, noarch, 9 packages / 0 MiB
* monolythic design
* one needs to install most of the texlive-texmf to run texlive
  smoothly (100MiB+)
* most of the texlive features like fonts/styles missing as it was
  only packaged to find a replacement for tetex after its upstream
  abandoned the project


New version texlive-2008 (to be in f12):
* one single texlive package generating 3944 subpackages / 1065 MiB
* spec file automagically generated from upstream metadata with
  http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/tl2008/tl2rpm.c
* upstream collections/packages are separate source tarballs
  (one could update one small source tarball if a particular style
  needs update and doesn't need to repack the whole single tarball or
  patch it)
* new texlive is maximally scalable depending on which features are
  needed:
  - basic installation needs only 12 MiB of packages to be downloaded!
  - essential features such as pdflatex is supported in this basic
    scheme
* it is a full (not truncated or otherwise crippled) version of TeX
  Live


texlive-2008 pros:
* about 70 MiB saved space on installation media!!
  - especially appreciated by Fedora Live, note that it means 10%
    space saving on CD medium! So it could be filled with additional
    software
* faster buildroot installation
  - many packages need texlive to build their documentation, most of
    them needs only the basic texlive scheme
* maintenance in sync with upstream by design
  - spec file is generated from upstream metadata by my utility
    above
  - upstream ships tarballs of styles/fonts, etc. separately

texlive-2008 cons:
* 3944 subpackages, texlive.spec is 2.7 MiB in size
  - this is huge number. I need to catch up with releng guys whether
    the repo metadata growth isn't too big and how to workaround it

Hope it's not a showstopper ;)

It looks like a nice new feature for f12 and a good opportunity
to do rpm/yum/koji torture tests :)

Cheers,
Jindrich 


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