What about LaTeX in FC6?

[Marc Schwartz]

Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>> "PJ" == Paul Johnson <pauljohn32 at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> PJ> What is FC6 going to do?
> 
> This close to test1 I assume that tetex will stay for FC6.  It would
> be a great time for the community to start working on TeXLive so that
> it can get into Extras ASAP and be ready for FC7.
> 
>  - J<

There is lots of discussion going on over on the teTeX and TeXLive 
lists. Much of it still largely philosophic about how to structure a 
TeXLive based offering. Some of which is along the lines of a "Core", 
"Recommended" and "Extra" type of construct relative to how TeX 
components might be packaged.

Core would be along the lines of a very basic, bare minimum, offering of 
TeX tools. Recommended would perhaps constitute the additional 
components that would otherwise be in teTeX. Extra would be all other 
"stuff".  Details of course TBD.

One of the things that was pointed out to me by Ralf Stubner on 
comp.text.tex, is that the MikTeX (Windows) folks have a tool called MPM 
(MikTeX Package Manager), which is in effect a yum type of tool for 
CTAN. This tool has been ported to Linux (beta):

   http://www.miktex.org/unx/

Ralf would prefer to not see a second PM approach, but finds MPM 
"interesting" if one is interested in an implementation where there 
could be a smaller (than teTeX) Core offering, which could be then 
augmented by users with MPM to meet local requirements.

MPM seems interesting because (I think) it would enable a reduction in 
the workload on the upstream TeX and downstream distro package managers 
like Jindrich Novy (FC's tetex maintainer), relative to trying to keep a 
TeX offering updated as new versions of packages become available on 
CTAN. One could simply run the MPM (as we do now with yum) and update 
installed packages with new versions from CTAN or install new ones as 
they might be needed. That would ostensibly reduce the pressure to 
release incremental large scale package updates frequently via yum repos.

It probably raises a PM coordination issue if one has packages installed 
from an official FC repo as well as from CTAN directly, but I suspect 
this would be a technical hurdle that could be overcome in time.

This solution seems intriguing, but I suspect there will be a lot of 
discussion with the TeX community before some form of distro agnostic 
solution is proffered. FC7 might be a reasonable target relative to 
timelines...

HTH,

Marc Schwartz