Very nice of you to write the tl2rpm converter

[Vasile Gaburici]

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 8:13 PM, Jindrich Novy <jnovy at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> TeX Live is released once per year and the set of things that need to
> be run in %post seems to be quite consistent during the year, so it
> shouldn't be a maintenance nightmare. But it definitely becomes a
> downstream packaging nightmare next year.

Actually, it seems that the whole point of the new packaging
architecture is to provide frequent updates. The updates have been
frequent up to the official release of today anyway. Karl said
something about freezing the updates while the official DVDs get
burned, but they plan to resume them shortly after that (sorry I don't
have the email handy, but it was on tex-live at tug). I don't know how
often the updates will happen, better ask Karl about that, but my
guess is there will be more frequent updates than the once-a-year of
the past. So, there needs to be a way to rebuild just some of the
rpms.

The modularity of TL itself is a bit misleading however. I've never
seen a single binary, say pdftex, getting updated. Instead the updates
that touch core binaries are full recompilation of all the core
binaries. But the arch-independent packages were updated in a
fine-grained manner.

As far as updating the installer itself, well that happened too. I'm
sure of it because on Windows they make you run a separate script to
finish updating files that are normally locked while tlmgr is running
(this includes all the Perl modules it uses). As you put it, hopefully
that won't happen too often.

Thanks,
Vasile