texlive

[Brent Stephens]

On Friday April 20 2007 5:29:19 pm Jordan Mantha wrote:
> <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

I'm really glad your getting this together!  I just joined up.  As I stated in 
my original post, I'm not much of a developer (although I know a smattering 
of programming), but I will do whatever I can to help.

-bns