[gentoo-dev] Future of tetex

[Martin Ehmsen]

This is status report from the TeX department of text-markup, which I
find necessary due to partly sad, partly exiting news :)

So if you don't care about TeX you may skip this post.

The sad news first:

A couple of days ago Thomas Esser (the te in teTeX) announced[1] that he
wont make another release of teTeX, ever. The reason behind this is that
the the source part of teTeX (the source for the binaries) is included
in the TexLive[2] and is maintained there. A second reason is that it
takes to much of his time to prepare a release.

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).

Now for the exiting (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.

2. Transform _all_ the dev-tex packages which currently installs into
/usr/share/texmf to install into the newly introduced
/usr/share/texmf-site. This solves a lot of problems for users which
currently are stuck with old versions of e.g. latex-beamer (due to file
collisions if installed in /usr/share/texmf[4]). But this requires
figuring out how to resolve deps, since many tex packages is included in
the texmf-tree installed with tetex and also has its own package in dev-tex.
We are currently considering using the same approach as with the perl
packages (using new-style virtuals), but I guess thats on hold until it
is okay to introduce additional new-style virtuals?

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!

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).

Comments, suggestions, offers of help, anything would be useful :)

Martin Ehmsen

1: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tex.tetex.general/1226
2: http://www.tug.org/texlive
3: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=124511
4. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=94815
5: http://www.ctan.org
6: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110494
7: https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85411
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