Hi, On Tue, 2006-05-30 at 20:59 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote: > Just to give a distribution specific example: Fedora Core would > probably reject any dramatic increase in a monolithic substitution.
Yes, as the teTeX maintainer in Red Hat I can say that it's very unlikely that it's possible to include a larger teTeX replacement into the distribution because of the size of Fedora Core keeps growing and release engineers have hard time to fit all the stuff on a finite number of ISOs... To give you an example, before the FC5 release I was asked whether I can move tetex-doc to Extras what contains all the documentation in the texmf tree so that it can be removed from Core, because the tetex-doc RPM has more than 50M in size. I refused that of course. But there's a hard pressure to make it smaller even if the total size of all teTeX rpms is about 110M. > It > would most likely lead to a Fedora-specific split of the texmf tarball > (since some parts are needed for the documentation of other packages) > and users, as well as TeXLive maintainers would be irritated by that. What makes me think about some even more minimalistic texmf variant that only contains some essential part of a texmf tree? > But if there would be say a program source tarball, a "basic TeXLive" > texmf tarball (which compares in size/functionality to teTeX) and a > tarball containing all the rest, then Fedora Core would ship the first > two on the media and keep the third in the Fedora Extras repository > where size doesn't matter. Considering that the Extras part of texmf tree would be much harder to maintain since it contains everything that didn't fit into the basic part, the one-year release period for it would be fine. On the other hand it would be easier to release the minimalistic variant of the texmf tree more often then as the update that is needed to be shipped to the users won't be that huge. Jindrich P.S. Thanks again to Thomas for maintaining teTeX up to now. -- Jindrich Novy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/ (o_ _o) //\ The worst evil in the world is refusal to think. //\ V_/_ _\_V
