Fedora LaTeX SIG?

[Jonathan Underwood]

2009/6/11 Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com>:
> I'm interested.  Migration to texlive was discussed here before.  Died after
> nobody wanted to try to inspect licences of all the packages, IIRC.

Well, it's not so much that (Tom Callaway actually did go through a
number of the files packaged). The problem is that the way in which
texlive is put together makes it totally miserable from a distribution
packaging perspective, essentially dumping a vast ammount of upstream
tarballs into one tarball. This in turn makes it a really horrific job
from a license auditing point of view.

In my opinion, the root of the problem(s) from a distribution
packaging POV is that texlive is itself a distribution with its own
package format and manager etc. which has no integration with
distribution packaging systems. Roughly and broadly speaking this is
how things are right now (grossly oversimplified):

1) Texlive amalgamates and consumes vast numbers of upstream packages.
2) These packages are are unpacked and built into a build tree, and
texlive folk also add their own modifications and patches to integrate
the whole lot into a useable system. This build tree pretty much
defines the filesystem layout.
3) the buildtree componenets are distributed as texlive packages using
their packaging format. For distributions the buildtree is more or
less made available in a couple of big tarballs.

For any other software, Fedora would expect to be doing part 2 itself,
and this is where the problem lies.

What I believe we need to work on is expanding the tool set used for 2
by texlive such that they can be used inside RPM packaging in order to
allow us to control packaging ourselves, working from the true
upstreams, rather than the tarballs of the texlive sandbox. The trick
is to also take advantage of the integration work done by the texlive
folks.

The problem is, this is an awful lot of work. I have made stabs at
starting it, but, well, paid work and sleep are the enemy of Fedora
contributions.

J.