TeXLive 2008 in F10?

[Vasile Gaburici]

Are there any plans to include TeXLive 2008 in F10? Currently a
preview is available, which is essentially a release candidate. I
works fine for me on F9, but I have not packaged it.

I understand that the new TeXLive 2008 installer and packaging system
is a lot of work to deal with, but TeXLive includes LuaTeX, which is
the designated successor to pdfTeX, being developed by the same people
that maintain pdfTeX, which won't get any signifiicant new features.
So, for all practical purposes LuaTeX is the "new TeX".

LuaTeX can already use OpenType fonts (towards which Fedora is
moving), although not for math for which there are no usable *free*
Unicode fonts available right now (the only usable one being Cambria
Math from MS). There is no OpenType support planned for pdfTeX, so
it's important to get users exposed to LuaTeX as early as possible,
and Fedora is a good way of doing this :)

The entire TeXLive 2008 system uses a new kpathsea replacement written
in Lua, which is *many* times faster the original. This results in
major speed improvements for all TeX programs.

The "packetization" of TeXLive, plus the support in LuaTeX for
OpenType fonts should make the TeX fonts mess (bug 456580) a more
tractable problem, even though it won't solve it right away.

Also, TeXLive 2008 includes lcdf-typetools, which I was planning to
package separately - the package has been orphaned around FC6 or so.

The main issue that I see is how to deal with 1Gb+ of TeXLive 2008
packages (over 1000). Perhaps something similar to cpan2rpm is in
order?