Martin Ehmsen wrote: > This is sad because teTeX always has been a very stable (if you consider > the mess a TeX distribution normally is). There is a reason why teTeX > has been the default TeX distribution on almost every flavor of Linux. > > But it also means that we (Gentoo) should make the transition to TeXLive > (Debian is doing the same thing, and possible many other distributions). > But that leaves us with several problems/questions which needs to be > solved/answered (see below).
I use LaTeX quite extensively in my work. Time allowing I would be happy to help out more and provide testing on ~amd64. I am currently writing up my thesis so I could test it out with that! > > Now for the exciting (but time consuming) news: > > The road to a stable TeXLive in Gentoo: > > 1. Stabilize tetex-3.0_p1[3]. We are almost done, there are very few > real bugs left, and tetex-3.0_p1 is already much more stable than > tetex-2 ever was. I hope this will happen in the next month. This is long overdue - again if I can help please let me know. I use this all the time and have been doing so for the last year. Do you have a stabilisation tracker bug set up for this yet? > > 3. Create a TeXLive ebuild and put it onto ~arch and have ~arch user > switch over. > This requires us to figure out how to create a texmf-tree. In the past > Thomas Esser created a very solid (although containing rather old > versions) texmf-tree with packages taken from ctan[5]. > There are several possibilities: > 3.1 Create our own texmf-tree (can largely be automated by scripting). > 3.2 Use MikTeX package manager[6] which was ported to Linux. > 3.3 Use something similar to the g-cpan.pl script used by perl, to > install packages from ctan[7]. > I haven't evaluated the possibilities yet, but comments are more than > welcome! > I would favour option 3.1 personally, and it would be great to keep our LaTeX packages more up to date as I sometimes have to manually update these packages. > 4. Mark TeXLive stable and kick teTeX from the tree. > Here we are talking at least a year into the future (unless text-markup > suddenly gets flooded by new devs). > > In the process of creating a TeXLive ebuild I am thinking about making > it much more modular (which seems to be _the_ buzz word at the moment :) > At least I would like to split the TeX source and texmf-tree into > separate ebuilds (no matter what the texmf-tree might look like, see above). > Other possibilities are creating separate ebuilds for most of the > TeXLive distribution, like pdftex, kpathsea, dvipdf*, ... This would > make it much easier for us to locate bugs and fix them, but requires > much more initial work (this actual resembles the creation of our own > TeX distribution). It would be great to see a more modular approach to LaTeX, allowing fine grained control, bug fixing and a more up to date installation. > > Comments, suggestions, offers of help, anything would be useful :) Time allowing I would be willing to help out with the migration and stabilisation on amd64 at least (I am part of that arch team). My group uses tetex-3 and we have had very few issues. Thanks for putting the work in - big changes to LaTeX in Linux! Thanks, Marcus -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
