texlive

[Jordan Mantha]

<sorry if this breaks threading, I wasn't subscribed>
tephens <brent_stephens <at> comcast.net> writes:
> 
> Is anyone developing texlive?  It seems that no one really works on it; 
> occasionally one of the devs sticks the debian package in the ubuntu
> repos.  
> I would really like to see it better maintained, and I am willing to work
> on 
> it, but I don't really know where/how to begin.  If anyone has any useful 
> suggestions, I'll listen.

Interesting you asked, I've been thinking we need a TeX team in Ubuntu. So
far we've done a fairly poor job of keeping up with Debian with these
packages.  Without pitti and doko's work it would be much worse. A couple
of the Debian TeX maintainers Norbert and Frank have been gracious enough
to do a fair amount of triaging of TeX bugs in Launchpad.

Here's my plan of attack. I've just created a Launchpad team (ubuntu-tex)
[0].  There are a few MOTUs that are also interested. I think the goal
should be to roughly be the Ubuntu equivalent of the debian-tex-maint group
in Debian [1].  The work roughly involves three areas:

1. Triaging and forwarding TeX bugs to Debian. I've gone through all of the
textex and texlive bugs on launchpad and was able to close/reject roughly
1/3 of them. We need to stay on top of them so people don't have to wait 6
months to get a reply.

2. Testing and QA, we need to make sure that the TeX packages we end up
with are as good as we can get. This might mean filing Freeze exceptions to
get important bugfix releases or backporting fixes to the existing Ubuntu
versions.

3. Transitions. I think gutsy will mostly likely see a tetex -> texlive
2007 transition although I haven't seen any specs are talk about that.
Maybe a good topic of discussion?

Anyway,anybody who wants to help with the maintenance of TeX in Ubuntu can
join ubuntu-tex and all skill levels are welcome. We need testers, bug
triagers, and packagers. I've created a wiki page for the team [2] where we
can start working up things to do.

-Jordan Mantha

[0] https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-tex
[1]
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuTeX