Hello Archers, I want to bring up the TeX distributions issue. Current status: - tetex in extra: unmaintained (upstream) though still usable, some parts are already getting outdated (pdftex, some latex packages); - texlive in community: firmicus keeps it pretty up to date, the dist itself is actively developed. Proposal: Switch to texlive eventually officially (for now keeping tex-related pkgs in community). How it can be done: - from the dev side: 1) "officially" announce that the switch *is* going to happen. 2) move tetex and all packages depending on it from extra to community (that's only: kile, latex2html, lyx, texmacs) (the trouble is that these makedep on tetex: evince, kdegraphics, yodl; but maybe just keep tetex on the build machine for a time being?) - from TUs: 3) gradually replace tetex deps by texlive deps in community packages - from users: 4) gradually replace tetex deps in AUR by texlive Comments: - 3) and 4) don't need to happen instantly - we'll just have 2 tex dists at the same "level" in community for a while - note that none of the above programs link anything against tetex, they just need working tex compiler (which texlive definitely provides), so they don't even need to be recompiled - the official statement is important, so that we can nag maintainers to change dependencies ;) - there's been on/off-going discussion about this on the forums (http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=358172 - tomk has said "Regarding the possibility of bringing texlive into the official repos, there are currently two missing ingredients among the existing dev team: interest and time. AFAIK none of us is a habitual tex user, and that would be the first requirement." - so this proposal asks for the opposite: bring the so far official tetex down to community, to level it out with texlive and make the switch powered by the users possible.) What do *you* think? PS. Sorry for the long e-mail (about 15-times longer than I usually write). -- Jan Spakula