Hello Norbert, Just back from the mountains myself.
Norbert Preining wrote: > Hi Paul, > > quick reply, I am half a day off the mountains, > > On Di, 15 Jul 2008, Paul Gevers wrote: >> I am currently working on packaging the MiKTeX-tools for Debian, which >> consists mainly of a LaTeX package manager. (I hope you know the tools.) > > No idea what these tools are. MikTeX is Windows specific AFAIR, and I > have no idea what they are doing. The main tool from MiKTeX that also works under Linux is meant to install/update/uninstall LaTeX packages from a MiKTeX repository. An additional tool lets you create MiKTeX packages from local LaTeX packages (not relevant for most people I guess). A third tool shows information about the package. The rest are aids to these tools. >> By the way, how do you feel about such a LaTeX package manager for >> Debian? Do you think it might be useful? Or does TeXlive include a > > I would say that it is *MAYBE* a good idea, but I guess the problem is > that > - where to put the updated packages? > you don't want to overwrite files installed by the dpkg package > manager that way, or your system will be messed yompletely. > And we will NOT accept *any* bug reports anymore since we cannot > guarantee that we can reproduce that ;-) > - where to put new packages > - how to work across updates of TeX Live, where suddenly files in > TEXMFLOCAL are older than the ones in TEXMFMAIN/texmf-texlive? > > Honestly, I don't see a big advantage, since the package manager just > circumvents the Debian packaging structure, which is *bad* by > definition. > >> manager which does the same thing? I read somewhere that TeXlive is also >> (partly) based on MiKTeX. > > No, definitely not. We use scripts developed by TE for teTeX, and Miktex > maybe also uses these scripts, other than that there is no interaction. > Pity for that, but it is not on our (upstream TeX Live) side, since we > proposed to have a common packaging structure. But the developer of > MikTeX is not interested in cooperating with TeX Live. > > So please first explain what these magic tools should do? > > BTW; TL 2008 will have the TeX Live Manager (tlmgr), inlcuding a Perl/Tk > interface, for managing, updaing etc. No idea how I will integrate that > one with Debian, enough to do to program itself (what is also my job). So I guess that the functionality of the TeX Live Manager will be quite like the functionality of the MiKTeX manager, only the TeX Live one is integrated into a complete TeX environment. Which gives me the feeling that getting the MiKTeX-tools into Debian will hardly be worth the effort, aside from the problems you mention above, which I have not yet solved in any way. With kind regards, Paul Gevers -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
