Alexander Hansen wrote: [] > With regard to TeX, we seem to have vocal people who want a newer TeX > distro but purport not to know what to do to implement it. We should > make extra sure that changing from tetex is as painless as possible, to > satisfy everybody.
Some more remarks on the tex situation: - Fink needs, for various reasons, its own tex package. This needs to be able to coexist with a tex system installed from one of the texlive variants. - The currently existing Fink tetex packages may be outdated, but they are good enough for a lot of people. This includes myself, and I and people around me are using it in our work on a daily basis. But this includes also a very active group of Fink users and developers in Japan who would probably object seriously if Fink suddenly switched to a less well-tested new version with a completely different structure. - Creating new Fink packages based on texlive would be hard work. Until recently I think this would have been far too hard for the currently available manpower, because texlive is not exactly adhering to the open source philosophy. They don't provide source tarballs you can download and then simply run configure; make; make install to get a working system. They really want you to download the whole precompiled collection and install it in their way. AFAICS, recently some people have been creating source tarballs that can be used in the standard way. We could profit of this work and that of darwinports and debian in this respect. - Any system-tex package has to be compatible with the Fink tex packages, so creating one has to be an afterthought to creating Fink tex packages. I agree that the current texlive/mactex system is now sufficiently stable so that a Fink system-tex package using it is possible, but for the reasons mentioned above, I don't see it happening soon. Another reason no one really wants to spell out clearly (but I'll do it anyway) is that the tetex maintainer who is also the Fink project leader has, for almost two years, not had enough time. Several of the core maintainers and developers are in the same situation or have already given up. I feel the same threat as John does, namely that if the current situation is continuing for much longer, there is a real danger that the whole Fink project is going down the drain. -- Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel
