TeX Live 2008 - Would like to change port structure.

Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 03:57:28PM +0100, Edd Barrett wrote:
Hi from EuroTeX!

Some of you may know that I have started playing with the svn sources
of TeX Live 2008 which is due to be released very soon.

I am thinking about making some changes to the way the port is done.

a) Use a temporary prefix
'Build' is a shell script used to configure and build TL into a PREFIX
in the cwd (relative to the configure script). It sets some defaults
and the PREFIX and then runs the build itself. The main tediousness of
porting texlive is getting it all to listen to DESTDIR. Pushing
patches upstream (up, up-stream that is) has proven difficult. So is
it acceptable to have the build install into the default place
(./inst) and then move it int the WRKINST manually using a
post-install target? How would I achieve that? I think I mean setting
FAKE='', and by letting the build script use it's default ./inst
PREFIX for installation.

That above paragraph may even make sense :P

Actually, no it doesn't.

You shouldn't ever touch FAKE in new ports.

It won't do anything, in any case (note to self: update docs!)

You *can* touch FAKE_FLAGS to do anything you want, on the other hand.

I am still not sure, so I want to know what people think.

I'm afraid that texlive is hardcoding stuff, so you will find all kinds
of refs to ./inst in the stuff you want to move later, which is worrysome.

I'm not sure you're going to gain anything.


As far as installing into ./inst, you can probably deviously symlink
WRKINST to ./inst in pre-install, so that you don't actually have
to move anything.

The naming still worries me.

b) I'm thinking about making texmf-* overlap and use MULTI_PACKAGES,
ie. texmf-full = texmf_minimal + texmf_full. This means I could get
rid of some @exec kludge, but also means that upgrades from tl2007
will not be smooth. Any thoughts.

I'm not a big fan of that, considering the size of the beast. A few @exec
is a small price to pay to avoid having to mirror several hundred megabytes
more