Very nice of you to write the tl2rpm converter

[Vasile Gaburici]

On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 9:32 PM, Nicolas Mailhot
<nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> Le lundi 01 septembre 2008 à 19:39 +0200, Jindrich Novy a écrit :
>
>> This looks like an optimal granularity for it since collections
>> contain largest possible TeX Live bits that don't yet conflicts. But
>> the review process for 400 generated specs quite scares me.
>
> Just start by splitting out all the stuff useful to non-TEX users (ie
> fonts) and you'll find reviewers and possibly co-maintainers. I'd rather
> review a score of simple packages that follow standard templates than
> the horror the current mashup is.

That can't be done by just grouping the TeXLive packages, you'd need
some splitting as well. In TL 2008 each font package contains the
fonts in a bunch of formats, some of which are useful only for TeX,
some of general interest.

Take for instance a simple font like cyklop (a relatively new titling
font from GUST -- don't worry these are digitizations of old metal
fonts, so no copyright issues), which has only a regular and italic
variants. In the same package you find the two .otf files of general
interest, two afm/pfb pairs of legacy interest, as well as a whole
bunch of (La)TeX-specific files (.fd, .tfm, .enc, .map and a .sty) for
various (La)TeX 8-bit encodings. As you know all these files are
essentially only metrics and encoding vectors; TeX82 drivers and
pdfTeX use the pfbs for the actual glyphs.

There's no problem moving the otf files to the system font dir
however. XeTeX can find them via fontconfig, and for LuaTeX you can
set OSFONTDIR.

Note that the LuaTeX that ships with TeXLive 2008 is hardly usable: it
has bugs in it's font cache code, and it's installed (as in copied)
but not really cofigured by TL (there's a page with instructions on
contextgarden if you really want to use it), so don't worry too much
about it. Anyone interested in LuaTeX uses the ConTeXt "minimals"
distro these says --- LuaTeX doesn't currently support LaTeX or plain
TeX.

>
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
>