TeX Live 2008/9 packaging and you

[Jindrich Novy]

On Wed, Jun 03, 2009 at 03:06:05PM -0400, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Jindrich Novy (jnovy at redhat.com) said: 
> > New version texlive-2008 (to be in f12):
> > * one single texlive package generating 3944 subpackages / 1065 MiB
> > * spec file automagically generated from upstream metadata with
> >   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/tl2008/tl2rpm.c
> > * upstream collections/packages are separate source tarballs
> >   (one could update one small source tarball if a particular style
> >   needs update and doesn't need to repack the whole single tarball or
> >   patch it)
> > * new texlive is maximally scalable depending on which features are
> >   needed:
> >   - basic installation needs only 12 MiB of packages to be downloaded!
> >   - essential features such as pdflatex is supported in this basic
> >     scheme
> > * it is a full (not truncated or otherwise crippled) version of TeX
> >   Live
> 
> I'd agree with what others said - 4000 subpackages is a showstopper;
> just do it as separate packages. If bootstrapping is a pain, we can
> get a custom dist-f12-texlive place to get it going before it lands.

Yup, that could be awesome.

> 
> Coming at it from an outside-TeX standpoint: why does *each* package
> need separate -doc and -source packages? What's the use case of those?

*-source:
The runtime part of noarch TeX Live could be built from the stuff within
-source packages thus one source package per one runtime TL package.
Some TeX freaks want to look into/modify the source. Actually we may have
a license obligation to ship sources to the packages (not sure about
that, need to catch up with spot about that)

*-doc:
They are HUGE. They are actually 2/3 of all the disc space needed to
install a complete TeX Live. So better to have them separated when one
doesn't need them.

To give you some stats which TL packages requires what space:

doc	661MiB
source	 30MiB
runtime	362MiB
binary	 12MiB

Jindrich

> 
> Bill

-- 
Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com>   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/