Wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/TeXLive2025

Discussion Thread: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/165119

**This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.**
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process,
proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback.
This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee.

== Summary ==
TeX Live is intended to be a straightforward way to get up and running with
the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system
with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux and macOS, and
also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro
packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many
languages around the world.

This change will update TeXLive in Fedora to 2025, and move to a modular
packaging approach that allows for more fine grained upgrades and
maintenance.

== Owner ==
* Name: [[User:spot| Tom Callaway]]
* Email: [email protected]


== Detailed Description ==
The Fedora "texlive" package is the largest RPM spec file in Fedora. While
it was broken into two packages ("texlive" and "texlive-base") a few years
ago, the "texlive" spec contained thousands of sources and was very
difficult to maintain. Additionally, because all of the noarch components
lived in a single SRPM, updating any component generated an update for
_all_ noarch texlive components.

With this change, we update to the latest version of TeXLive (2025) but we
also move to a modularized packaging system, which splits the "texlive"
SPEC into a set of collection and scheme packages, reflecting the
categorization that TeXLive upstream defines. Each collection package will
package the immediate component dependencies as subpackages.

This will require 50+ new package reviews.

== Feedback ==

The alternatives to this change are:
 * Just update the existing texlive/texlive-base files to TeXLive 2025.
While possible, it is very difficult to get a single spec file updated. In
2023, this took me several months. This time, I chose to invest time in
developing a modular approach instead. I also created a set of python tools
to generate these collection/scheme spec files, which I plan to open source
(but not package in Fedora because that's just too meta).
 * Leave TeXLive at the 2023 revision. This is not ideal and not in keeping
with Fedora's "First" principle. Additionally, users have asked for the
2025 update.

== Benefit to Fedora ==

The modular packaging approach will make TeXLive easier to maintain and
update in Fedora. It is my hope that other maintainers will feel more
empowered to help maintain subsections of TeXLive that they care about, but
even if not, it will be easier for _me_ to maintain it. This approach will
also lower the number of updates pushed to Fedora users with any parts of
TeXLive installed.

TeXLive 2025 provides a few key advantages:
 * It generates PDF-1.7 format files by default
 * Scaling fonts to >= 2048pt now results in an error message, instead of
(unhandled) arithmetic overflow or silent changing of the user's value
 * Improvements to LuaTeX and pdfTeX
 * Many individual components have had updates since TeXLive 2025.

== Scope ==
* Proposal owners:

50+ package reviews for the new modular set of texlive packages. These spec
files, while sometimes long, are simple. None of them have %build sections,
and their %install sections are 95% code copying, and 5% patching or file
delete/move operations.

None of them depend on other Fedora package changes, though, we will
recommend a change to emacs-auctex to better detect the current set of TeX
provides.


With the exception of emacs-auctex, we do not anticipate any other
developers will need to make changes. The goal is for any TeX documentation
in other Fedora packages to continue to render and save without issue.

While a mass rebuild is not required, it has been beneficial in the past to
identify bugs in TeXLive. Because the scope of TeXLive within Fedora is
just generated documentation in TeX format, failures here are usually
worked around by providing a pre-rendered document.



* Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

* Alignment with the Fedora Strategy:
TeXLive provides a broad set of internationalization support, allowing
people to work in their native languages. Keeping TeXLive current helps
Fedora "Reach the World".

== Upgrade/compatibility impact ==
Users may wish to delete their local cache in ~/.texlive2023. After
upgrade, a new ~/.texlive2025 directory will be created and used.


== Early Testing (Optional) ==


== How To Test ==

The "texlive-base" package contains some local testing to ensure it is
being built with a working TeXLive environment, and it also runs the full
upstream test suite. No special hardware or data is needed to test.
Expected outcome is that TeX documents render properly.


== User Experience ==

Users will get the latest version of the TeXLive components and system.
Users will also get _less_ TeXLive package updates from Fedora.

== Dependencies ==


Fedora packages with TeX-format documentation which render that
documentation as part of the build process. No other changes outside of the
TeXLive system are necessary for this change.

== Contingency Plan ==



== Documentation ==

https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news


== Release Notes ==

Fedora has updated TeXLive to 2025. It has also split out its packaging by
collections in order to improve maintainer sanity and minimize texlive
package updates to end users.
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