(La)TeX add on packages and the future

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Sunday, 11 February 2007 at 19:35, Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> With upstream support for tetex ended and the intention for Fedora to
> shift to TeXLive, I think there's a need to decide upon some new
> policies/guidelines for packaging (La)TeX related packages.
> 
> Currently, such packages are mostly named tetex-foo, falling under the
> "add-on package" directive in the packaging guidelines, and they
> Require tetex, tetex-latex etc. While the TeXLive packaging is still a
> work in progress (as far as I know), it might be prudent to start
> thinking about it at this point. The large majority of these "add-on"
> packages actually are agnostic with respect to which TeX distribution
> is being used. It would be nice to make these add on packages useable
> with other TeX distributions that users might install - for instance
> it's not inconceivable that for some legacy reasons, a user might
> actually need to install the old tetex packages rather than the shiny
> new TeXLive ones.
> 
> One thing I could think of is using virtual provides, eg. Provides:
> TeX, LaTeX, and then extra style file packages could require those,
> rather than tetex/TeXLive. What about package naming - clearly
> tetex-foo won't be sensible anylonger - what about simply TeX-foo, or
> tex-foo in the future?

FWIW, I prefer lowercase names, i.e. tex-foo (or latex-foo, if the package
is a LaTeX add-on, I'm not sure if we need the distinction).

Regards,
R.

-- 
Fedora Extras contributor  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DominikMierzejewski
Livna contributor http://rpm.livna.org MPlayer developer http://mplayerhq.hu
"Faith manages."
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