TeX fonts, part one [Was: Re: [Fedora-packaging] Proposed amendment to general packaging guidelines: no bundling of fonts in other packages]

[Vasile Gaburici]

The TeXNaming draft guidelines
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/TeXNaming] seem to
indicate that "tex" should go before the package name. E.g.
tex-foo-fonts, and perhaps latex-foo-fonts as well. I don't know if
ConTeXt needs any special bits for fonts, but in Fedora it gets
packaged separately as texlive-context. The only bit that surely
doesn't need anything special is texlive-xetex, which can use the
system fonts.

A minor issue: dvipdfm and dvipdfmx don't have a tex prefix in their
package names, even though both put files in the system texmf tree. I
don't know if they're usable without TeX installed, but I kinda doubt
it...

There draft guidelines say that there are several ways to specify the
"Requires:" for TeX. But on a recent review, I got this:
? MUST: The package must meet the Packaging Guidelines .
The Requires for texlive-latex should be replaced with Requires: tex(latex)

The sooner this gets sorted out the better...

On Sun, Jul 27, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-07-27 at 13:40 +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
>> I had a look the TDS (http://www.ctan.org/get/tds/tds.pdf). Nothing
>> written there prevents the use of symlinks. In fact their not even
>> mentioned because TDS is supposed work even on MSDOS. The question is
>> if it will actually work if we do that. I guess Jindrich Novy, the
>> texlive packaged owner knows better than any of us, so I'm cc-ing him.
>
> It seems the tex-fonts-hebrew at least provides TEX context for some
> system fonts
> http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewcvs/devel/tex-fonts-hebrew/tex-fonts-hebrew.spec
>
> So proper packaging of Type1, TTF and OTF fonts would probably be
> something like this
> 1. normal foo-fonts system package that can be used by any font system,
> including TEX
> 2. tex-foo-fonts or foo-texfonts package that depends on foo-fonts and
> adds additionnal TEX files (without duplicating the font files
> themselves), with symlinks or references or whatever works in TEX
> 3. master TEX comps group or package that assembles all the foo-texfonts
> packages.
>
> Of course I know next to nothing about TEX so I'd be a lot happier if
> people like Jonathan Underwood wrote the whole TEX font packaging rules
> in my stead.
>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>