[tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter

[Jindrich Novy]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce first success to package TeX Live 2008 fully
automatically to RPM. This was possible thanks to the great design
of tlpkg metadata that is very easy parsable. And it is actually a
result of desperate need to package TeX Live in some sensible way in
Fedora.

The RPMs are created by a bash script [1] that resolves a dependency
tree for given set of schemes/collections/packages and generates
package descriptions, filelists and requirements. Then a final spec is
generated from "_main.spec" template.

The script allows either to have each package separately within one
huge spec file which will result in a possibility to install any
package in TeX Live 2008 separately, but with the cost of very high
number of subpackages (~4000+). Another option is to have only schemes
and collections within spec with an assumption that collections won't
conflict. This reduces number of subpackages to ~400.

The generated specs can be seen here [2] for TeX Live to be packaged
solely to schemes and collections and here [3] for one RPM subpackage
for each TeX Live package (+collections and schemes dependent on
them).

Please note that the script is still under development and it doesn't
yet generate %post actions for packages even though the code is mostly
designed but untested (and heavily based on install-tl).

The size-sorted list of RPMs for the collection only install can be
seen in [4].

Jindrich

[1] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/tl2rpm
[2] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-only_collections.spec
[3] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-all_packages.spec
[4] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-rpmlist.txt

P.S. I found some insistencies within TeX Live package database,
particularly broken dependencies in:

collection-graphicstools
- caused by missing bin-pngtools for all Unix-like arches

and

collection-xetex
- caused by missing xecyr package for Unix-like arches

what prevented me to include scheme-gust, scheme-full and
scheme-medium so they are excluded from the above lists.

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