[arch-general] texlive (again?)

[Jan Spakula]

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   parts are already getting outdated (pdftex, some latex packages);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