Packaging (parts of) tetex-texmf-beta?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi all,

this mail is especially for all the people that were involved more in
teTeX development earlier, but now just read and don't speak up much.

In woody, the tetex-base and tetex-extra packages are not from a
released teTeX version, but from upstream beta versions. Again now, some
weeks before the release of sarge, we have the problem that a new teTeX
release will come soon, but too late for complete inclusion into sarge.

I would like to hear opinions on whether we should package (parts of)
the beta release of the tetex-texmf tarball.

I think we should not hope to package teTeX-3.0 - it will be released
much too late to safely include a thoroughly tested package in sarge. I
also would not want to touch tetex-src/tetex-bin, that's were most of
the incompatibilities are sitting, from a libkpathsea soname change up
to the use of pdfetex for dvi output.

The question is what to do with tetex-texmf. In general, (La)TeX input
files on CTAN are quite independent of each other, so that it should be
possible to include them with tetex-bin_2.0.2. There are some
exceptions, however, especially from a packaging point of view:

- There have been changes in the TeX Directory Structure, especially in
  texmf/fonts, and in texmf/dvips. When I prepared the packages of the
  first beta release, it took me lots of work to adapt our packaging to
  those changes, and I think there are still many errors in it.

- Since some toplevel directories in $TEXMF are also important for the
  configuration of programs (texmf/dvip{s,dfm},...), we should not
  expect teTeX-2.0.2's binaries to work cleanly with teTeX-3.0's files
  there. 

This is why I think that only the texmf/tex/ subtree, maybee only
texmf/tex/latex, is suitable for inclusion into a stable Debian
package. 

I have discussed this in private with Hilmar, and he even thinks that we
should pick only individual LaTeX packages and update them. The
advantage of this, as I understood it, would be that then we know what
we have changed. On the other hand, it is hard to find out which
packages really are worth an update - apart from one's (or two's...)
personal needs.

What do you think?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster, Biozentrum der Univ. Basel
Abt. Biophysikalische Chemie