On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 15:20, Michael Smith wrote: > All, > > Recently the following idea was suggested on the Fedora Forum. To quote: > > "Am I the only one who thinks this is the wrong way to package TeX Live
Maybe not the only one, but *packaging tlmgr* is the wrong way for any linux distribution in my opinion. (Keep in mind that the author of tlmgr is himself a mantainer of TeX Live packages for Debian and he wrote another few thousands of lines of code for TeX Live packaging of Debian. The distribution itself doesn't use tlmgr at all.) Just a few reasons why you don't want to package just tlmgr: - anyone who wants to use tlmgr and the latest packages is free to install TeX Live manually - when TeX Live 2012 will be released, repositories for TeX Live 2011 will be removed (there is only an archive left on a single server, but that one doesn't include the latest version of packages) - this means that Fedora would have to create its own package repositories, unless you want your tlmgr package to become obsolete before FC 15(?) is even released (imagine that Fedora gets released and two months later repositories are removed from CTAN servers) - repositories only provide the latest version of each package; it is basically impossible to install original version and packages from "frozen" 2011 release (the only way to do so is to fetch the huge tgz, checkout SVN or fetch iso image, but in either case you don't really get the comfort of tlmgr) - original TeX Live gets some testing and at least the most nastly bugs are usually discovered in time; when packages are updated, there is zero checking being done before updates proliferate to TeX Live; if author submits a broken package to CTAN, it gets updated in TeX Live unconditionally; that usually gets discovered after a few days, but in the meantime packages are broken for everyone and there is no way to recover (apart from using backups or by manually downloading an older version from SVN repository) Of course all the reasons you mentioned are true, but the benefits of tlmgr don't outweight the high costs of not having a stable TeX distribution. Mojca _______________________________________________ TeXLive mailing list TeXLive@linux.cz http://www.linux.cz/mailman/listinfo/texlive
