[tex-live] Re: Packaging TeXlive as Debian packages

Sebastian Rahtz sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk
Wed Jan 5 15:39:50 CET 2005


Norbert Preining wrote:

>
>>One very serious problem which would effect this ever
>>reaching "real" Debian is that the source is monolithic.
>>Ideally, we'd split the current source tree into separate bits,
>>but perhaps thats better left to a later stage.
>>    
>>
>
>Not necessarily. It is allowed that several packages are build from ONE
>source package (eg all the xfree packages are built from one source
>package).
>
ah, excellent. I had not appreciated that Debian accomodated this.

> Ours contain the source stuff with some scripts.
>
>For the texmf stuff (packages not containing binaries) I don't know
>about it. I am not a professional DD, but I can ask around.
>  
>
the concept of "source" here is fairly meaningless. And I wonder about 
documentation.
but we could put texmf-doc into /usr/share/doc/texlive

>THere are several things more, but these will come only after some time:
>- what about debian tex packages (preview-latex etc) installing files
>  into /usr/share/texmf
>  
>
indeed. thats more complicated. but lets not worry too much about that now

>- texmf.cnf: Maybe we can recompile binaries such that in some cases
>  (-DDEBIAN) first /etc/texmf/texmf.cnf is searched for
>  
>
hmm. a lot of work to maintain a separate set of binaries.

the alternative is to add "export TEXsomething=something" to 
/etc/profile, or whatever,
but that isn't proper in Debian.

I think in practice, if we are to re-use existing binaries, we need a 
symlink
from /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf (which will be found by 
/usr/bin/tex, agreed?)
to /etc/texlive/texmf.cnf, and make that one the master copy.

sebastian



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