Willie Wong ha scritto:
On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:33:04PM +0200, b.n. wrote:
ehm, I guess I wasn't clear.
You *already* knew:
- That there are texlive and tetex
- That tetex was EOLed and texlive was the next choice
- That tetex and texlive are mutually exclusive
- That the ebuild was in the tree
Oh.. that...
Yes I know. People's ignorance is amazing, isn't it? :)
tetex was not running into problems. tetex has almost always been a
one man act, and the maintainer, who, after over a decade of
maintaining bug fixes and what-nots, finally decided that he has no
more time and no longer cares enough. And he pulled through until a
viable alternative was available.
Well, that's among what I call "running into problems". Having a
software you rely upon being discontinued is not nice.
- Knowing nothing about what tetex, texlive etc. are, I even could
expect that they could happily live together (e.g., if they are two
implementations of tex, that one could eselect one or the other. Naive,
but why not?)
- Knowing nothing about texlive, I couldn't know there was its ebuild.
The best thing to do would be to ask here, I think. Of course, that
leads to the problem of you not knowing that a question ought to be
asked to start with...
Yes, that's exactly the trouble. Once I know there is a question, I can
google it myself, asking on forums and MLs, etc. But how I know?
Let's just say I have an exceptionally good memory. The death of tetex
was announced about two years ago
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20060612-newsletter.xml
and I know I also saw that fact somewhere on /. (perhaps not an
article but a comment). After I saw the announcements, I went to
http://www.tug.org/tetex/
where, the first thing they (I mean, Thomas Esser) say is that "I
suggest ... TeX Live project".
I was to say "ok, it was on gwn, my fault", when I read:
"Tetex changes
Tetex's upstream maintainer Thomas Esser hass announced that he won't
make any further tetex releases. This will have some mid- to long-term
effects on how tetex is maintained in Gentoo. Gentoo developer Martin
Ehmsen shows the possible methods for handling this – while it seems to
be undecided for now how to proceed there will be changes in the future.
Stay tuned… "
It basically doesn't say "you better upgrade to texlive before tetex
goes in the /dev/null department". It says "well, tetex maintainer steps
down." That's very much different -someone could have stepped in and
replaced Esser. It is alarming, my fault for having missed it, but not
nearly as much as what I'd expect. Most importantly, no link at all was
posted for a migration guide.
What I'd expect is gentoo-announce to shout loud things like "Attention,
please! People using tetex should consider upgrading to texlive unless
their very own life depends on texlive! The migration guide is there
[link]. Problems should be reported here,here and here." Possibly with
repeated announcements: one for ~arch people ("hey, this is beginning to
be pushed in testing,report here..."),so that also arch people can
prepare, and then repeat it for the arch people, when it's time.
I've very seldomly seen stuff like that. I am now checking my
gentoo-announce folder on thunderbird, and in 2 years I find only
something about PHP4 being masked, apart from GLSA stuff. Shouldn't
gentoo-announce serve the purpose of announcing stuff like texlive,
expat upgrade, gcc/glibc upgrades, the upcoming baselayout-2 thing (that
from posts here looks like a potential storm of s**t for the unwary),
etc.? If it's not gentoo-announce, what is the right place?
Following this ML helps, following GMN too (I'll read it more carefully)
but I'd like something "official" and granular like a mailing list about
that.
m.
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