Synaptic

[Norbert Preining]

Dear Dominik,

On Fr, 15 Jan 2010, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
> Thank you very much indeed for clarifying things for me.  There's obviously
> been masses of work on this going on by you and colleagues that I have been

Yes, I was working quite hard on TL itself and Debian packages, and still am.

BTW, if you want to try it now, why not try out the PPA packages
(personal package archives or so) from 
	https://launchpad.net/~aelmahmoudy/+archive/tl2009
that way you get TL2009 ready for Ubuntu ...

> anything I can do to help?

Puuhh, since you are using Ubuntu I cannot suggest much. Probably 
testing the above packages is already of help, and report there any 
problems.

If you *WANT* and speak Perl, you are of course invited to join
the Debian TeX Task Force, which is low on "personal" ;-)

> Is there documentation somewhere about the processes involved in what you
> call the "rather big transition" of packages from CTAN to the Debian
> repositories?  Is this transition always via TeXLive, i.e., an annual update
> event?

Well, the part
	CTAN -> TeX Live
is documented in several places, e.g., the second (technical part) of my
talk at the CSTUG 2008, or in several articles. You might look into the
the collection of talks and articles 
http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/doc/articles/
the CSTUG presentation is in 
http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/tlpkg/doc/articles/cstug08/cstug08.pdf


> Am I right in thinking that Christan Schenk maintains a completely separate
> repository, by himself, that is unrelated to the Debian repository?

Yes. Even completely separate from the TeX Live repositories (TeX Live
itself, the *real* one as distributed by TUG/on DVDs etc allows for
updates over the internet since 2008, and these packages are available
on CTAN mirrors, see the CSTUG article). Unfortunately it seems that
Christian does not have interest in collaboration. I was thinking 
about a joint package format, but so it be.

> Best wishes, and greetings from the Institute, now amongst the beautiful old
> AKH quadrangles (picture attached).

I know well, I left for Japan end of September. It is one of my favorite
places in Vienna, and since I lived very close by, just outside the Gürtel,
I was always cycling through the AAKH campus every day.

Best wishes

Norbert
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Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan            TU Wien, Austria           Debian TeX Task Force
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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