6:03 p.m.
"TeX live is maintained IMO by real MORONS."
is what you wrote.
Yes it is.
Probably you never had occasion to have closer look what exactly is
maintained in texlive source tree.
I had fist time been trying to contemplate what exactly is texlive tree
about 9 years ago.
What was scarry 9 years ago now is even more scary today.
Will try to present you what is in texlive today over now available
rpm packages.
So lets go alphabetically:
Name : texlive-ESIEEcv
Summary : Curriculum vitae for French use
Description :
The package allows the user to set up a curriculum vitae as a
French employer will expect.
Package contains style template to write some CV. Using google you can find
few examples of how it looks like.
Number of google results: ~2.9k. I can give anyone £10 to anyone who in
last 5 years been using this template installed on any Linux distro
installed from packages to wrote own CV.
Name : texlive-allrunes
Summary : Fonts and LaTeX package for almost all runes
Description :
This large collection of fonts (in Adobe Type 1 format), with
the LaTeX package gives access to almost all runes ever used in
Europe. The bundle covers not only the main forms but also a
lot of varieties.
Few questions:
What is the size of the cross section of the sets: "we are using Linux" and
"we uses runes fonts"?
Maybe few artist in whole word are using runes .. how many of them are
using Linux?
Why those vectorised resources are only available as TeX users?
Why TeX is not prepared to use system wide Type1 font and is not able to
share those fonts with other applications?
Why most Type1/TTF fonts are at least served three times as: ghoscript
fonts, X11/Weyland fonts and TeX fonts?
Why TeX live is not able to share those fonts with other applications?
Maybe someone who what to quickly prepare some post card want to use those
runes as some funny markings? However probability that he/she will use TeX
is probably the same as probability that bucket of water left on open fire
will freeze (according to quantum physics probability of something like
this is greater than zero) and probably more likely will try to use
LibreOffice. Isn't it?
Does Fedora really need to regenerate package with these fonts every time
when someone will change even single bit in any TeX live resources?
Name : texlive-a2ping
Summary : Advanced PS, PDF, EPS converter
Description :
a2ping is a Perl script command line utility written for Unix
that converts many raster image and vector graphics formats to
EPS or PDF and other page description formats. Accepted input
file formats are: PS (PostScript), EPS, PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF,
PNM, BMP, GIF, LBM, XPM, PCX, TGA. Accepted output formats are:
EPS, PCL5, PDF, PDF1, PBM, PGM, PPM, PS, markedEPS, markedPS,
PNG, XWD, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, XPM. a2ping delegates the low-
level work to Ghostscript (GS), pdftops and sam2p. a2ping fixes
many glitches during the EPS to EPS conversion, so its output
is often more compatible and better embeddable than its input.
If anyone today will need to convert any of those formats to EPS or PDF
more likely will use convert from ImageMagic.
Isn't it?
I'll stop here after only three examples but still more than 2.5k more
remains.
Really please try to go package by package. In source texlive tree all this
garbage has own .tlpobj file marking this as separated TeX package where in
reality most of those resources are needed by anyone. In most cases they
are kind of examples, POCs or something which was useful but 10 years ago.
I don't remember name of this TeX package but I'm almost 100% sure that it
is still in texlive tree somewhere. "The Package" generates using metapost
cube view with visable only one side, two sides and EVEN THREE sides!!! 8-O
As example of generating some graphics it was obsolete in the time when
people started using Corel Draw in Win 3.11 era (anyone remember this
program?).
Probably more than 50% (if not more than 80%) of the TeX live is like this.
Most of the resources should be archived and preserved for next generation
cyber archeologist however now they should not be served as regular rpm
packages because it will make look Fedora stupid ("who is more stupid?
someone who is stupid or someone else who follows stupid one?").
I'm pretty sure that someone who had this grand idea converting TeX
packages to rpm packages never red even 5% of the descriptions of those
"packages" stored in .tlpobj files or been trying to as themselves "do I
really need to package this TeX package as rpm one?"
And now back to what I wrote about TeX maintainers.
TeX live is more like black hole sucking every bit of anything related to
TeX. Ones something stored in the tree doesn't matter is it still usefull
or not still will be "maintained". Those people are thinking that they are
doing great job but in reality as now TeX live holds probably almost
everything what was produced as TeX tool/example it shows how small this
world is.
What happens from loooong time with TeX recalls me something which is
called "Parkinson law" (no, it has nothing to do with Parkinson disease)
which says "work expands so as to fill the time available for its
completion". One of the Open Source "laws" says that "ones some source
code
reaches some critical mass number of people want to maintain it will be
always greater than zero". As consequence it could be transformed to
"amount of time spend on some OSS projects used to go to infinity even
without any functional/technical progress".
I'm pretty sure that TeX maintainers will be working on TeX to the end of
the World .. and probably one day longer.
If someone still is not convinced that using word which I've used is not
accurate/proper I'm really opened on .. more precise propositions. And I
promise stop using this word in context of TeX maintainers.
And at the end last two sentences as kind of final conclusion:
IMO current Fedora problem with TeX live is that some people (I'm
pretty sure good people) are trying to follow (probably unconsciously)
trying replicate in rpm packages with almost 100% accuracy what was
produced by TeX maintainers ..
TeX is great tool and I'm still able to amaze quality of the typography on
printed single A4 page people who never saw document printed from compiled
TeX document (especially if it is formal document which will be read by
someone who cares about aesthetics), however what needs to be delivered as
dist rpm packages really needs to be very carefully chosen.
kloczek
--
Tomasz Kłoczko | LinkedIn: *http://lnkd.in/FXPWxH <http://lnkd.in/FXPWxH>*