[tex-live] TeX Live RPM for Red Hat RHEL5?

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Thu May 7 12:28:39 CEST 2009


On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 8:06 PM, MARTIN, GEORGE H, ATTSI
<georgemartin at att.com> wrote:

> Is there by any chance a TeX Live RPM available for Red Hat Linux RHEL5, or
> perhaps a Fedora Core (6?) RPM that will install on RHEL5?

There are Fedora 9--11 rpm packages for tl2007, but for RHEL5 you may
have to build them
from source, see
<http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5402>.
Some centos users build texlive rpms:

<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-July/061620.html>
<http://pj.freefaculty.org/Centos/5/i386/kups/SRPMS/>

The drawbacks to creating texlive rpms for RHEL5:

a.  other RHEL5 packages probably depend on teTeX.  If you install
TL2008 using the
generic installer, you can keep tetex for RH package dependencies, and
control which
version is used by adjusting the PATH variable.

b.  the .spec files will probably need tweaks for RHEL5, and there may
be some issues
with older versions of libraries.   The generic binaries from generic
texlive are statically
linked as much as practical, so you avoid some issues with library versions.
<http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2008-July/061024.html>
indicates that Fedora
texlive depends on libpoppler, etc.

c.  rpm default requires installing and configuring as root -- texlive
configuration scripts
are much too complex to be trusted.

d.  the existing rpm's are all for tl2007, so you miss out on all the
progress in tl2008,
including the package manager

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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