Texlive packaging (Was: A proposal for Fedora updates)

[Kalev Lember]

On 03/27/2015 05:49 PM, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>> "KL" == Kalev Lember <kalevlember at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> KL> If texlive packaging is causing issues with update pushes, could
> KL> maybe ask the texlive maintainers to rework the packaging?
> 
> The texlive packaging is basically the way they were required to do it
> way back when.

What do you mean with "were required to" ?

> It used to be just a big ol' "texlive" package with only
> a few subpackages that bundled up countless different upstream
> packages.  Now it's a big ol' texlive srpm that bundles countless
> different upstreams, but then splits each of those upstreams into a
> subpackage.  A better way from a packaging standpoint, but not the
> happiest outcome for our infrastructure folks.

I strongly disagree that it's better from a packaging standpoint. I
tried to open texlive spec file in Firefox earlier and it just froze up,
trying to load the 16 MB file. This is a good example how to not do
packaging. It just scares away anyone from touching the spec file.

Debian seems to have found a nice middle ground, where they have 4
source packages, each producing a small number of binary packages
(that's the number in parenthesis):

https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/texlive-base (20)
https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/texlive-bin (8)
https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/texlive-extra (24)
https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/texlive-lang (61)

-- 
Kalev