IRILL - Research and Innovation on Free Software

Distributing TeX and Friends - methods, pitfalls, advise


"Distributing TeX and Friends - methods, pitfalls, advise"
by Norbert Preining,
on 2013-02-03 00:00:00
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The TeX environment has grown slowly but steadily to a huge collection of programs, fonts, macro packages, support packages. Current TeX Live ships about 2Gb in more than 2000 different "TeX Live packages". As teTeX stopped to be developped and supported several years ago, TeX Live has taken over as the main TeX distribution in practical all areas, not only on Unix, but also Mac (MacTeX is based on TeX Live) and is also gaining on Windows (where MikTeX is still strong).

Integrating TeX Live into any distribution is a non-trivial task due to big amount of post installation tasks that have to be performed. Although over the last years the quality of packages has improved, we (TeX Live development list) still get often bug reports that stem from incorrect packaging. This talk presents in an overview the structure of TeX Live and the list of important and special configuration files. Furthermore, base on the experience of packaging TeX Live over many years, we will give advise and best practice examples. The talk is targetted not only at Debian, but at any distribution that redistributes TeX Live in one way or another.