TeXLive 2008 in F10?

[Vasile Gaburici]

That file Jonathan pointed me to is a converter from the old TeXLive
tpm format, which is now obsolete. The guy that wrote that script,
Norbert Preining, is one of the principal authors of the new TeXLive
packaging system. Too bad he doesn't dig Fedora.

The TeXLive folks are pretty serious with this installer. They've got
an API, but the only complete bindings are in, cough, Perl. There's a
talk here that describes some of the API and more importantly the new
package structure; skip the incoherent part until Norbert starts
talking - you'll see a slide with his name when that happens around
minute 19: [http://www.river-valley.tv/conferences/bachotex2008/#0104-Reinhard_Kotucha].
His sildes are here:
[http://www.logic.at/staff/preining/talks/bachotek08-talk.pdf]. I'm
summarizing the essential points from the talk below.

A single package is described by a file ending in ".tlpobj", which is
generated starting from a ".tlpsrc", which is an auto-filled spec
basically because it can be as simple as the package name; the missing
info is pulled from CTAN. The ".tlpsrc" can use complex regexp patters
to describe the files, but AFAICT the ".tlpobj" is equivalent to a rpm
manifest in that it contains an exact file list, dependencies and a
post install script; you have license info too. The key slide (for us)
 from the talk is the one describing the fields of a tlpobj:
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/tlpobj_fields.PNG]. It looks good
enough to make a rpm from it! As you can see TeXLive versions the
stuff from CTAN in their own svn. This is quite useful for us because
stuff from CTAN is often an unversioned pain. An example tlpobj:
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/tlpobj.PNG]. Another one that goes
with the quote "this is something new - we have dependencies":
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/tlpobj2.PNG]. They also have a
complete database by concatenating all the ".tlpobj" files in the file
"texlive.tlpdb". The API from 10,000 feet:
[http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/tlpobj_API.PNG]. A 5-page paper that
gives a bit more detail than my paragraph:
[http://www.logic.at/staff/preining/pubs/guit07.pdf]. I was unable to
find the API documentation on the net however; it's probably in their
svn somewhere. If you have any luck, let me know.

Another bit of relevant info from the talk is that there are about
1500 packages (more than Debian has!), but 1200 of them are simple
(LaTeX) style files. I his talk he mentions that (until April) he had
not done any work towards integrating the new TeXLive with any Linux
distro. He also predicts that we'd be in trouble since we can no
longer "hack around" ;)

Also, going back to an earlier question of Patrice, Norbert mentions
that there's support for regenerating fmutil.cnf, language.dat, and
updmap.cfg from a database (whatever that means) plus local additions,
which is probably what Patrice wants.

Hope this helps,
Vasile

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 1:33 AM, Jonathan Underwood
<jonathan.underwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not quite the same thing, but there is tpm2deb which is here:
>
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-tex/texlive2008/trunk/tpm2deb-source.pl?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
>
> ... might have a look to see how hard it would be to re-plumb that to
> produce rpms.
>
> J.
>
>