Re: tetex rpm's
On 2006-01-31 22:15:50 +, Robin Fairbairns wrote: martin schröder wrote: On 2006-01-30 16:23:35 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. Please don't duplicate effort. meaning: please everyone switch to using debian? I welcome any effort for rpm-based TeX distributions that are better then those provided by the distributors, but when starting this one should at least study the work that has gone into texlive-debian. Best Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de
Re: tetex rpm's
Axel Thimm wrote: On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 12:40:03AM -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: I've started an rpm package repository for LaTeX packages targeting the teTeX distribution. At least for now, I'm restricting it to noarch packages (ie tex4ht would not be a candidate for inclusion). The temporary homepage is at http://mpeters.us/tetexrpm/ Well, given the nasty feedback until now, let me reweigh the picture a bit and say that this is a very good thing. Some rpm distributions give less love to tex and friends than others and Michael is destined to make users of these distributions tex-happier. Talking from the point of view of someone trying to keep up to date about 60 Fedora workstations with respect to teTeX I have found Michael's efforts very useful and his spec files knowledgeable. (As an aside not tetex related: not all independent rpm repositories for Fedora were created equal in that respect). Of course comments in this list follow the principle of minimum energy with respect to whoever makes them. For people using rpm based distributions I see no disadvantages or duplication of effort. In abstract using TeX Live, or the MikTeX management system, or some other packaging system sound good ideas but _for me_ they would be a test of Murphy's Law or a considerable time investment. -- João Palhoto Matos http://www.math.ist.utl.pt/~jmatos Departamento de Matemática Instituto Superior Técnico Lisboa mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: tetex rpm's
On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 12:40:03AM -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: I've started an rpm package repository for LaTeX packages targeting the teTeX distribution. At least for now, I'm restricting it to noarch packages (ie tex4ht would not be a candidate for inclusion). The temporary homepage is at http://mpeters.us/tetexrpm/ Well, given the nasty feedback until now, let me reweigh the picture a bit and say that this is a very good thing. Some rpm distributions give less love to tex and friends than others and Michael is destined to make users of these distributions tex-happier. Suggestions to move to Debian or use a completly new parallel packaging system to the system's own aren't really targetting what Michael is setting up. In this sense: Thanks for the effords you're putting into this and let's hope this flies off as it should. -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net pgp6AedUHItW9.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: tetex rpm's
On 2006-02-02 21:26:08 +, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: and pdftex needs zlib and libpng, but there isn't a lot else. Only if it's specially compiled. Default uses the included libs. Best Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de
Re: tetex rpm's
Richard Cobbe wrote: Any nontrivial package (and teTeX certainly qualifies!) has to rely on other packages in the system to satisfy certain dependency requirements. Therefore, in general, it's going to be non-trivial to install an .rpm on a Debian system, or a .deb on an RPM-based system: the two systems do not necessarily provide the same versions of various libraries, and so forth. This is not necessarily a big deal. TeX is large, but not that complex, and without that many dependencies. It is in general rather self-contained. Yes, you need need the obvious libc stuff, and pdftex needs zlib and libpng, but there isn't a lot else. Obviously, 99% of a TeX system is system independent anyway. Still, there may of course be hidden nasties. -- Sebastian Rahtz Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431 OSS Watch: JISC Open Source Advisory Service http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk
Re: tetex rpm's
On 2/2/06, Sebastian Rahtz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I know that the earth is flat, global warming is happening, and everyone should use Debian, thanks :-} That's OT :) Please don't make Distro war here :) --http://vnoss.orgVietnamese Open Source Software Community
Re: tetex rpm's
Sebastian wrote: ... I am not sure what Martin means, but my take on this is that Norbert Preining has put a LOT of effort into a script which builds Debian packages from the TeX Live master tree. It would be well worth trying to write a different output module on that to generate an RPM instead of a DEB. Maybe it wouldn't work, but it would be good to try. Maybe the following helps: == http://www.easysw.com/epm/ EPM is a free UNIX software/file packaging program that generates distribution archives from a list of files. EPM Can: * Generate portable script-based distribution packages complete with installation and removal scripts and standard install/uninstall GUIs. * Generate native distributions in AIX, BSD, Debian, HP-UX, IRIX, MacOS X, Red Hat, Slackware, Solaris, and Tru64 UNIX formats. * Provide a complete, cross-platform software distribution solution for your applications. -- ...Rolf
Re: tetex rpm's
On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 19:53 +, Sebastian Rahtz wrote: I am not sure what Martin means, but my take on this is that Norbert Preining has put a LOT of effort into a script which builds Debian packages from the TeX Live master tree. It would be well worth trying to write a different output module on that to generate an RPM instead of a DEB. Maybe it wouldn't work, but it would be good to try. I've been packaging rpm's since 2000 when I did it for a commercial .com selling a Red Hat based LAMP. The automatic tools for building an rpm can sometimes produce adequate rpms, but each one has to then be checked. For example, perl has a package that builds perl rpms from CPAN - I don't know of a single distribution that actually uses it, because it ends up being less work to just build them manually. Sometimes generated rpms can be used as a decent starting point, but I have not yet seen a tool that does a good job of consistently producing quality packaging. One of the things they often get wrong is directory ownership. A package should cleanly un-install, meaning that when it is removed, no unowned directories should be left behind. It also should not own directories that belong to packages it depends upon. Configuration files need to be properly marked as such, some files need to be ghosted, etc. - so any package auto generated needs to be checked anyway, at which point you might as well just write it from scratch. The hardest part about making an rpm is reading the README file, and sometimes the .sty file, to make sure the License field is correct (the CTAN pages are sometimes incorrect).
Re: tetex rpm's
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: EPM is a free UNIX software/file packaging program that generates distribution archives from a list of files. I am sure some clever person could write a TeXLive .tpm - EPM config, again paralleling and learning from Norbert's work. Whether anyone has the energy is a moot question! I know that the earth is flat, global warming is happening, and everyone should use Debian, thanks :-} -- Sebastian Rahtz Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431 OSS Watch: JISC Open Source Advisory Service http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk
Re: tetex rpm's
On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 09:24 +, Jan Sundermeyer wrote: Are you aware that Miktex provides the whole package infrastructure. The miktex maintainer has recently ported his package manager to linux and it works pretty well. Furthermore the package repository is excellently maintained. Yes - I am aware of the MikTeX port. I think it is a good solution for maintaining stuff in a local user texmf when you don't have root. On Windows (and Mac OS for that matter), there is not a good package management system that can keep track of all the software available globally. There is Windows Update, but that is only available to MS applications. On Linux, there are several good package management systems - RPM is one of them - that can control every aspect of the software installed on the system. Some tex related packages depend on on tex packages. fontools for example needs lcdf-typetools and some perl stuff. RPM can manage those as dependencies, and pull them in for the user when the user uses yum or apt to install tetex-fontools. You can run yum/apt as services that automatically update all software on your system, exiting and doing nothing if dependency breakage would result, etc. - and you do not need to use different tools for different software sets in order to keep everything at patch level - provided you stick with rpm to do so. When you start using other things (like cpan for perl, etc.) - unless they interact with the rpm database, they can't properly ensure that dependencies are met that are outside the scope of their immediate purpose (can MikTeX install perl modules for latex packages that use perl?). MikTeX may be a better solution for some people, I prefer to keep things simple and use one package management system. As far as MikTeX being excellently maintained - I don't doubt that. That's good, and it is important to me as well, which is why I've got a cron job that logs onto the ctan ftp site and does a modtime on the src zip files. If they are different than what I've packaged, I get notification. I'm guessing MikTeX does a similar thing. Anyway, this is tetex list - not comp.advocate.rpm - so I'll shut up. Point is there is more than one way to do things, I personally prefer not to mix lots of different package managers - when there is one that is quite capable of doing the job for the desktop platform I have chosen. The only issue is that distribution packager tend to use large packages for teTeX, and they aren't going to push 100MB of updates (about what results from building the tetex src.rpm) just because a couple .sty files have had bugs fixed. Perl and Python etc. are done in a much more modular way, allowing smaller updates of the components - teTeX probably should have been done that way, but it wasn't. One big src.rpm. Fortunately modular updates are possible. MikTeX is one solution, but RPM (imho) is a better one, at least for RPM based distributions.
Re: tetex rpm's
martin schröder wrote: On 2006-01-30 16:23:35 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 01:12 +0100, Martin Schr=F6der wrote: You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. Please don't duplicate effort. meaning: please everyone switch to using debian? or what?
Re: tetex rpm's
Martin == Martin Schröder [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: On 2006-01-30 16:23:35 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 01:12 +0100, Martin Schröder wrote: You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. Please don't duplicate effort. I don't think that the effort is duplicated. I don't know how reliable it is to extract deb files on rpm based systems, but I prefer that the conversion is done by the maintainer rather than by the user. Regards, Reinhard -- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
Re: tetex rpm's
Robin == Robin Fairbairns [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: martin schröder wrote: On 2006-01-30 16:23:35 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 01:12 +0100, Martin Schr=F6der wrote: You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. Please don't duplicate effort. meaning: please everyone switch to using debian? No. Many systems provide support for .deb files. I personally prefer that they are converted to the native package system by the maintainer of a particular distribution, though. Regards, Reinhard -- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
Re: tetex rpm's
Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com writes: On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 01:12 +0100, Martin Schröder wrote: On 2006-01-29 00:40:03 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: I've started an rpm package repository for LaTeX packages targeting the teTeX distribution. At least for now, I'm restricting it to noarch packages (ie tex4ht would not be a candidate for inclusion). You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. I know there are conversion utilities between deb and rpm, and it probably is possible to install dpkg and friends on rpm based distributions, but it is cleaner to stick with the native package manager if possible. Are you aware that Miktex provides the whole package infrastructure. The miktex maintainer has recently ported his package manager to linux and it works pretty well. Furthermore the package repository is excellently maintained.
Re: tetex rpm's
On 1/29/06, Michael A. Peters [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello list. I've started an rpm package repository for LaTeX packages targeting the teTeX distribution. At least for now, I'm restricting it to noarch packages (ie tex4ht would not be a candidate for inclusion). The temporary homepage is at http://mpeters.us/tetexrpm/ Cool !Do you have latest update of pdfTeX, ConTeXt, metapost,... in your RPMs ? --http://vnoss.orgVietnamese Open Source Software Community
Re: tetex rpm's
On 2006-01-30 16:23:35 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: On Mon, 2006-01-30 at 01:12 +0100, Martin Schröder wrote: You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? No, I don't run Debian - but that is cool. debian packages though don't work well with rpm based distributions. Please don't duplicate effort. Best Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de
Re: tetex rpm's
On 2006-01-29 00:40:03 -0800, Michael A. Peters wrote: I've started an rpm package repository for LaTeX packages targeting the teTeX distribution. At least for now, I'm restricting it to noarch packages (ie tex4ht would not be a candidate for inclusion). You are aware that the complete TeXLive is now available as a set of debian packages? Best Martin -- http://www.tm.oneiros.de
