[Ambassadors] Fwd: TexLive2008 for Fedora

[Mani A]

TexLive 2008 has a lot of new features including automatic updates.
And now we have some good news for Fedora too.

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Date: Aug 2008 16:38:58 +0200
From: Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com>
Subject: [tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter
To: tex-live at tug.org
Message-ID: <20080818143858.GA20012 at dhcp-lab-186.brq.redhat.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce first success to package TeX Live 2008 fully
automatically to RPM. This was possible thanks to the great design
of tlpkg metadata that is very easy parsable. And it is actually a
result of desperate need to package TeX Live in some sensible way in
Fedora.

The RPMs are created by a bash script [1] that resolves a dependency
tree for given set of schemes/collections/packages and generates
package descriptions, filelists and requirements. Then a final spec is
generated from "_main.spec" template.

The script allows either to have each package separately within one
huge spec file which will result in a possibility to install any
package in TeX Live 2008 separately, but with the cost of very high
number of subpackages (~4000+). Another option is to have only schemes
and collections within spec with an assumption that collections won't
conflict. This reduces number of subpackages to ~400.

The generated specs can be seen here [2] for TeX Live to be packaged
solely to schemes and collections and here [3] for one RPM subpackage
for each TeX Live package (+collections and schemes dependent on
them).

Please note that the script is still under development and it doesn't
yet generate %post actions for packages even though the code is mostly
designed but untested (and heavily based on install-tl).

The size-sorted list of RPMs for the collection only install can be
seen in [4].

Jindrich

[1] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/tl2rpm
[2] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-only_collections.spec
[3] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-all_packages.spec
[4] http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/files/texlive/texlive-rpmlist.txt
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There are a few minor issues with tl2rpm, but those should be resolvable.




Best

A. Mani







-- 
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc