On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 10:18 PM, stefan-husmann@t-online.de <stefan-husmann@t-online.de> wrote:

Hello,

first of all congrats to Kessia and Paulo and good luck.

I also have some questions.

On BBS there was a discussion about having the documentation of the TeXlive packages available in some repo.

There are some up-upstream authors of CTAN-packages who strongly want the documentation being made available in every distribution. On the other hand Arch politics also say that sdocumentation should be made available. So Firmicus asked me if I want to maintain the docus in community.

These would be the packages

4868099 texlive-bibtexextra-doc/texlive-bibtexextra-doc-2008.10643-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 214408939 texlive-core-doc/texlive-core-doc-2008.10646-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 20710413 texlive-fontsextra-doc/texlive-fontsextra-doc-2008.10613-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 1757920 texlive-formatsextra-doc/texlive-formatsextra-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 2794585 texlive-games-doc/texlive-games-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 2514887 texlive-genericextra-doc/texlive-genericextra-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 224299 texlive-htmlxml-doc/texlive-htmlxml-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 8765996 texlive-humanities-doc/texlive-humanities-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 483826 texlive-langcjk-doc/texlive-langcjk-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 2186946 texlive-langcyrillic-doc/texlive-langcyrillic-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 7552430 texlive-langextra-doc/texlive-langextra-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 1866546 texlive-langgreek-doc/texlive-langgreek-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 1879228 texlive-latex3-doc/texlive-latex3-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 178688742 texlive-latexextra-doc/texlive-latexextra-doc-2008.10642-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 2582106 texlive-music-doc/texlive-music-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 7200588 texlive-pictures-doc/texlive-pictures-doc-2008.10648-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 1079978 texlive-plainextra-doc/texlive-plainextra-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 121885850 texlive-pstricks-doc/texlive-pstricks-doc-2008.10641-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 22512122 texlive-publishers-doc/texlive-publishers-doc-2008.10647-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz 10615573 texlive-science-doc/texlive-science-doc-2008.-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz

sum (in bytes) 614579073

Exactly the same package sizes would be in community64 for x86_64 architecture. The packages are arch independent, though.

we don't have an arch independent repo just yet ;) Well, I don't have anything against having these in community, but I wonder how many people would install them. I would think the number of people will be very limited but I may be wrong on that. What you were saying about documentation being available, yes, but remember community still is not an official repo so that argument doesn't make much sense to me. Anyway, if you think they are usefull and think that quite a few people will use them, then go for it. Just please make sure you can maintain it for quite some time as I don't see another TU taking it over.

What do you think? Are they too big?

500 Mb for just documentation....who is ever going to install that, let alone read it ...

What are the plans about having a repo for architecture independent packages?

It will happen in time IIRC. But don't expect it anytime soon, we still have to switch to svn as of yet ;)

Aonther question: there is a package named sage-mathematics in the AUR. It has been orphaned, so I updated it. The PKGBUILD downloads an about 200 MB tarball, the resulting package has 560 MB and unpacks to more than a gigabyte. Moreover, it comes with its own package manager, and consists of sub-packages, that partially are already included in Arch, i.e. python, maxima, octave...

Should this go to community?

Please don't. It is just a frontend to access a lot of scientific programs (for a full list see http://www.sagemath.org/links-components.html). I think most of those, at least the important ones are already in extra and community. Better add the missing ones to community.

What are your opinions?

If you are looking for some package you are free to look through mine. If you see something which interests you (except e17 ones on a couple of others) you can probably take them. Just give me a note in that case.

Regards Stefan

Ronald

About sage-mathematics: It includes lots of libraries like lapack as well within the tarball, and the default installation procedure tries to build from its own lapack instead of using the system lapack. Building sage-mathematics would require us to properly identify the core components of sage which are not packaged separately (that's how it's being packaged for Debian [1] [2]): [1]: http://wiki.sagemath.org/DebianSAGE [2]: http://groups.google.com/group/debian-sage -- Abhishek Dasgupta