TeX Live 2008/9 packaging and you

[Seth Vidal]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Josh Boyer wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 02, 2009 at 01:27:26PM +0200, Jindrich Novy wrote:
>> 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?)
>
> Thanks for the heads up.  I've also CC'd Seth for comments on potential
> yum/repodata issues.


So F10 has ~17000 pkgs - in GA and updates combined.
11400 in GA (i386)
5500 updates (i386)

F11 will have ~13000 in GA

Texlive will bump that number by nearly 1/4th. That's a lot.

If these are subpkgs then the first time there is an update for ANY of 
them, we will immediately have another 1/4th added.

So if we add texlive+subpkgs and then have an update the next week we've 
just jumped the total number of updates up from about 6000 or so to 10000.


I don't think yum will be THAT much worse for wear but the amount of 
metadata the users will have to take will be MASSIVE. Now, I realize we 
need to spend more time on metadata diffing but holy crap we're going to 
hurt people in the meantime.

I'm betting we don't need 4000 subpkgs.

-sv