Packaging texlive (cleanup scripts)?

[Karl Berry]

(Would be better on tldistro, but anyway ...)

    there are many files which inside which are executeable but should not be 
    (e.g. README, jar-files, yaml, ...)

If you can make a list of the bogus exec files, I'll change them to be
non-exec. I imagine they were exec on CTAN and I didn't notice when
installing in TL.

    symlinks like (euptex -> uplatex, texdef -> latexdef). 

I admit I've never entirely (or need to) understand how distros handle
this. Maybe any distro maintainers here could chime in.

The format symlinks are created by the texlinks script.
It is run via the run-texlinks target, defined in
Build/source/texk/texlive/tl_support/Makefile.am.

The "extra" links like latexdef are defined by the bin_links variable in
Build/source/texk/texlive/linked_scripts/Makefile.am.

There is a file
Build/source/texk/texlive/linked_scripts/scripts.lst
which defines all the scripts that are the targets of symlinks in the
bin directories. I could easily add the bin_links definition to that
file, which I guess would theoretically provide enough information to
reconstruct the links.

    I'd suggest to have a folder (e.g. export-scripts) with symlinks to
    the real files, which can be installed/symlinked by any maintainer.

I could construct a directory of symlinks by extracting them from the
result of "make install" (what ends up in, e.g.,
Build/source/inst/bin/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu). But that would not
necessarily be in sync with anything but the development source, which
doesn't seem especially helpful.

If you want the symlinks corresponding to what is currently being
distributed to users, you can get that from any checkout or installation
of the source, in the bin directories.

It occurs to me that maybe your real question is one step back from all
that. My assumption has been that everything in the TL bin directories
may be included in /usr/bin by distros if they so choose.  (I complain
to authors when they use too-short/too-generic names.)  If you want to
skip some of them, that's fine too, but I can't know which ones those
are ... what would be useful? --thanks, karl.