starting Fedora Server SIG

[Patrice Dumas]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 12:56:22PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> 
> Le Mer 12 novembre 2008 12:05, Patrice Dumas a écrit :
> > Also there are still
> > monolithic big beasts like texlive, but I am not sure that it is
> > that desirable to fix those.
> 
> It is very desirable to fix texlive:
> 1. The latest upstream version is modularized, not monolithic,
> monolithic packaging prevents us from upgraring

Even though it is modularized, upstream (Karl Berry) nevertheless
adviced to use big meta-packages for tex users.

> 2. Lumping all kinds of different resources in a single package
> resulted in licensing hell (ask spot)
> 3. All the stuff inside texlive is not packaged following the
> guidelines that would have applied if it were packaged separately, and
> as a result stuff like fonts which could be used in a print server or
> some other server app is not made available to non-tex users.

I agree with all that, but even if the packaging is less monolithic,
there will certainly be inter-dependencies between TeX packages such
that in the end most of the packages will be pulled in as dependencies.
It still will be easier to use TeX components outside of TeX, like
fonts, but I don't think that it will help TeX users who will still need
to install a bunch of packages. There is already some splitting that
is quite artificial since all the packages get in in the end, because
they all depend on each others (dvips, tex, kpathsea, corresponding 
-texmf...).

--
Pat