teTeX upstream not maintained any more, what next?

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2006-06-08 at 12:37 +0200, Jindrich Novy wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Thomas Esser announced that there will be no upstream release of teTeX
> any more and suggested that people interested in teTeX should use TeX
> Live instead. The announce for it is placed on the official teTeX
> homepage:
> 
> http://www.tug.org/tetex/
> 
> The question is what to do now with the teTeX we have in Fedora.
> Michael A. Peters announced to me that he has started to create TeX Live
> clone as a replacement for the abandoned teTeX intended to replace teTeX
> in Fedora:
> 
> http://www.tetexrpm.org/texjive.html
> 
> The main issue while adopting TeX Live is that it has pretty huge texmf
> tree and many duplicities in documentation (PDF, DVI and PS files
> present in the same time for some styles...). The original teTeX kept
> more minimalistic variant of the texmf tree so I wrote Michael that we
> might consider replacing teTeX if the total size of the texjive packages
> will be less or equal to the current size of teTeX. Otherwise we'll
> choose another way how to replace teTeX.

I should point out that on my hard disk, I've got updated version of
what is there that is a little different.

I split the texmf into two src.rpm's - one intended for extras.
The manner of the split was rather arbitrary - basically just stuff that
was in my fat src.rpm but not in a TeX Live "standard" install (smaller
than their default install).

This resulted in a set of RPMs that is just barely smaller than what is
in core now (under 100MB) and a second RPM that would be sufficient for
Extras.

I also figured out how to build the binary a little cleaner, IE so
shared kpathsea library can be built at same time as static, and the
bundled freetype isn't needed.

I'll try to polish it up and upload what I have.

> 
> Because of this, not all styles/fonts will be probably shipped in the
> new TeX variant in Core so the rest will be in Extras. At this point I'd
> love to have a feedback from you guys what styles/fonts you want to have
> in Core and which are better to be stored in Extras. It's the right time
> to discuss it now as we might want to have teTeX replaced prior to FC6
> release.
> 
> Any suggestions are appreciated.
> 
> Cheers,
> Jindrich
>