[tex-live] Debian Packages of TeXlive

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Thu Jan 13 11:07:18 CET 2005


Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk> schrieb:

> Frank Küster wrote:
>
>>Did I understand right - this would mean/have meant 75 packages? I'd
>>rather reduce this.
>>
> but the big problem with teTeX is that it *isnt*
> broken into rational packages. we want to solve that

We too... that's what we set as the big goal for the next Debian
release. But I never thought about having 75 or 185 packages. At least
for teTeX, which is _not_ comprehensive as the C in CTAN, I'd go for ten
to 25 packages, or even less.

People keep complaining about the Packages file getting too big and hard
to handle for the user interface programs, but I would say this is no
argument - rather the handling of that file needs to be fixed. 

But in fact you should keep in mind that there is some space overhead in
a Debian package. With 200 packages from a single source, you should
really make the required /usr/share/doc/<package> directories symlinks
to /usr/share/doc/tex-live-base or however it would be called. Then
there's still 200 postinst and 200 postrm files in /var/lib/dpkg/info,
all with the same content. Hm, I have an idea how that could be avoided
- lets talk about that later.

>>What about licenses and the requirement to be Free Software? There are a
>>couple of files on CTAN which are distributable, but have certain
>> restrictions that go beyond what LPPL does.
> our aim is to be Free. but I can well believe we have missed some packages.

I'm sure you have - even in the much smaller teTeX there were some
non-free packages in the past.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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