Very nice of you to write the tl2rpm converter

[Jindrich Novy]

Hi Vasile,

On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 02:16:29AM +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
> It would have been even nicer had you cc'd fedora-devel-list...
> 
> For those that don't read the tex-live at tug list, or the ambassadors'
> list, here's the tl2rpm (prototype) announcement:
> http://tug.org/pipermail/tex-live/2008-August/017190.html
> 
> My main concern is that %post actions will turn out quite hairy, see
> below (you were probably on vacation then):

I was on PTO until the end of August. Thanks for heads-up.

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 8:19 AM
> Subject: Re: TeXLive 2008 in F10?
> To: Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood at gmail.com>, Patrice Dumas
> <pertusus at free.fr>, Development discussions related to Fedora
> <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>
> 
> 
> Initially I thought we could do without their installer, because I
> found only 4 types of "execute", i.e. post install script actions in
> the master texlive.tlpdb on CTAN.

Yes, upstream has only four %post actions, two of them are trivial and
is only adding maps or mixed maps to updmap.cfg. The third is just a
generation of fmt files. But the last, addition of hyphenation
paterns I still need to figure out. A good thing is that all of the
data needed to do such %post actions are defined in a similar way as
it is in spec so that it could be converted.

Currently I'm playing with compiling binary TeX Live 2008. And it is
needed to mention that Karl officially released TeX Live 2008 today.

> Then I had a look at their new
> packager's sources:
> http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/TeXLive/. Besides
> the 4 generic "execute" types, there are plenty of hardcoded
> package-specific things in TLPostActions.pm.

Right, this needs to be rewritten in something different than perl. Hopefully
it won't be that hard since we can ignore the win32 stuff, which seems
to be most tricky.

> So, I don't see an easy way of dealing with this. Duplicating all that
> stuff in rpm post scriptlets would be highly unmaintanable.

TeX Live is released once per year and the set of things that need to
be run in %post seems to be quite consistent during the year, so it
shouldn't be a maintenance nightmare. But it definitely becomes a
downstream packaging nightmare next year.

> The only
> sane way would be to install their packager library first, and to
> execute post actions from there as needed, which needs at least a
> wrapper script since that code is Perl. It's more than I have time for
> this weekend...

I'm not too good in perl so even if I have time through weekend I
can't do that :)

Jindrich

-- 
Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com>   http://people.redhat.com/jnovy/