On 03/27/2015 05:22 PM, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

...

• However, I'll note that the recent texlive updates were security as

*> >* well. ;) *>

If texlive packaging is causing issues with update pushes, could maybe ask the texlive maintainers to rework the packaging?

TeXLive packager says: No, sorry.

Kevin states that sigul lockups while running in batch mode so manual action is needed for builds with many subpackages. This is the root cause.

Fixing sigul and releng tools sounds like much better way of dealing with such issue than "Our broken tools don't scale so let's repackage every bigger package to workaround it."

Right now texlive has a 16 MB (!) spec file, producing a total of 5160 binary rpms each build.

What's wrong with it? It is autogenerated, you are not supposed to touch the spec file directly but edit texlive.spec.template and regenerate the spec file by tl2rpm. All subpackages are generated with correct dependencies (at least according to upstream metadata) and packages with wrong non-free licences are excluded from build automatically.

Yes, all this is done automatically. Good luck doing that by hand for 5160 CTAN packages with every update from CTAN.

If YUM metadata size is in question then it might make sense to have a mechanism of non-monolythic metadata in place, i.e. transactions not requiring TeX Live shouldn't download TeX Live's metadata. I'm sorry, I'm not a releng person.

TeXLive itself has not been updated for quite long time because of compilation error:

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I../../../texk/web2c -I./w2c -I/home/jnovy/rpm/BUILD/texlive-2014/source/work/texk -I/home/jnovy/rpm/BUILD/texlive-2014/sourc ../../../texk/web2c/luatexdir/lua/lepdflib.cc: In function 'int l_new_Attribute(lua_State*)': ../../../texk/web2c/luatexdir/lua/lepdflib.cc:186:58: error: no matching function for call to 'Attribute::Attribute(const char*&, int&, Object*)' uout->d = new Attribute(n, nlen, (Object *)uobj->d); ^ ../../../texk/web2c/luatexdir/lua/lepdflib.cc:186:58: note: candidates are: In file included from /usr/include/poppler/StructTreeRoot.h:20:0, from ../../../texk/web2c/luatexdir/image/epdf.h:51, from ../../../texk/web2c/luatexdir/lua/lepdflib.cc:22: /usr/include/poppler/StructElement.h:77:3: note: Attribute::Attribute(const char*, Object*) Attribute(const char *name, Object *value);

which prevents me from building it properly for couple of months now.

Now for something completely different. Why it is hard to reduce granularity of TeX Live distribution. TeX Live consists of the following levels of packaging abstractions:

Schemes consisting of Collections consisting of CTAN packages. Schemes depend on Collections and they depend of particular CTAN packages. Now, CTAN packages in Collections do overlap as well as Collections in Schemes do overlap so the only solution is to have CTAN packages packaged separately and define all dependencies via Scheme and Collection meta packages. This is roughly how it is done now.

Entropy never decreases and we need to deal with it.

Jindrich