On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:12:32PM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote: > >>>>> "Martin" == Martin Schr?der <[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 Schr?der 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.
Hear, hear! Because I think this has gotten lost in this conversation, let me emphasize that packages (be they .debs or .rpms or whatever) are not useful in isolation. 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. Debian also provides a great deal of infrastructure that isn't present on other Linux distributions, like the alternatives system or the update-* scripts. (At least, these weren't available on other distributions last time I looked, which was 18-24 months ago.) Therefore, the OP's effort is not necessarily duplication, and it may well be a worthwhile use of effort. That said, I agree with Sebastian Rahtz's suggestion up-thread: it would be a good investment to look at Preining's system and see what could be used (tho I suspect that it won't be as simple as swapping the .deb backend for an .rpm one). Richard
