If you have been following packages additions you may have noticed the addition of a couple of packages some weeks ago:

• dev-tex/pdftex
• dev-tex/mplib
• app-admin/eselect-mpost
• app-admin/eselect-pdftex

While our TeX distributions already ship them (pdftex and mpost), the first two are standalone packages and the last two are eselect modules to easily switch and use them.
With the bump to TeX Live 2008 I’ve made it possible to switch between different versions instead of being bound to what has been shipped with the release. This means that they will get bumped more frequently than they used to.

For the pdftex case, it is currently the same version that comes with TeX Live 2008 with the difference that the standalone version is patched to use poppler instead of its bundled xpdf library. I’ve prefered to leave the xpdf library as default for TeX Live because that is what upstream is using but some people asked for it to use poppler instead and a lot of other distributions (debian, fedora and their derivatives) are using it as the only way. That will probably make it easier to get improvements and security fixes on that side. If you wish to try it, install pdftex and eselect-pdftex and use “eselect pdftex” to set the standalone package as your default pdftex!

As for mplib, it is a reworked and rewritten version of the good old metapost. It can be used as a library (as luatex does) but you can also switch your default mpost interpreter to be it via the eselect-mpost package. Upstream says it is a work in progress but so far I have not seen any problem with it.

By the way, I have unmasked TeX Live 2008 today so that means ~arch users will upgrade to this release and can try these alternatives out of the box.

More than one week has passed since I’ve added TeX Live 2008 to the portage tree; I wanted to write a blog entry about it but have had absolutely no free time since.

So, what’s new with this release?

Of course there is the usual packages updates from CTAN, TeX 3.1415926 and METAFONT 2.718281 (yes, there is one more decimal!), pdfTeX 1.40.9 and more…

The most important addition would be LuaTeX, an extended version of pdfTeX using Lua as an embedded scripting language. Even if TeX is Turing-complete this makes much easier and nicer performing advanced tasks in your documents.
With LuaTeX comes ConTeXt Mark IV, the LuaTeX-aware part of ConTeXt. Unfortunately it comes unconfigured in TeX Live 2008 which means you’ll have to manually configure it. It does not poke well with the SELFAUTO* variables we have everywhere in our default configuration files so you’ll have to specify the paths for the texmf trees there and not rely on the texmf.cnf file.

TeX Live 2008 is still masked, awaiting for some keywording and some testing. I think I will unmask it very soon, moving the relevant masks to the various profiles that have problems with one or another package in this release.

While with TeX Live 2007, in my opinion, the urgency was more to have an up-to-date TeX distribution instead of our unmaintained and every day older teTeX, for TeX Live 2008 I’ve focused on cleaning up the tree: we have a bunch of packages in the dev-tex category, most of which were included in TeX Live 2007, so I’ve taken the liberty of removing most of those we had there from the “non core” packages of TeX Live, updating the dev-tex packages and using them from the app-text/texlive meta-ebuild (which should reflect what you can find in the official TeX Live distribution). Some other dev-tex packages had been masked or uninstallable and unmaintained for a while, those have been last rited and should be gone soon. If you find (la?)TeX packages that fall in one or the other category, it’s time to shout and file a bug about it! because it is not unlikely that I have forgotten some.

From the packaging point of view, with TeX Live 2007 we had .zip files for the CTAN packages included in TeX Live and a .tar.bz2 file for the source code of the binaries; with TeX Live 2008 everything is now in .tar.lzma files, what makes them smaller and faster to unpack. But, more importantly, each CTAN package is now split in “run file”, “doc files” and “source files” tarballs: that is, respectively, the package itself, the doc and source useflags in the dev-texlive ebuilds. As opposed to what was done in the 2007 version, the source of the packages isn’t installed anymore by default which saves some diskspace, the doc and source files tarballs are downloaded only if you want to install them what saves some bandwidth.

We now also have ways of updating core TeX packages (pdfTeX and mpost/mplib) independently of the TeX distribution via eselect modules, but that will be for another blog entry.

During the past months TeX Live has been in ~arch and seems to be working quite well for everybody since I do not receive that much bug reports, and the ones I’ve had are now fixed. However I’ve seen lots of people asking me: “Hey, where do I find the latex package foo ? I need it to compile my latex document.”.
The reason for this is that TeX Live 2007 ebuilds are split into several smaller ebuilds rather than having one single ebuild, like that was the case for teTeX which in the end was very hard to update and forced everybody to have hundreds of TeX packages that they would never use.

For that “problem”, Alexandre ( ‘Untux’ on the forums) has written a very nice script: texmfind. He has collected the list of files from most of TeX packages we have in portage, based on a TeX Live installation, and written a grep wrapper that digs into the data file to give you what package you should install in order to have what file.

For example:

$ texmfind moderncv.cls
dev-texlive/texlive-latexextra [1 file]
moderncv.cls

Found 1 texmf file in 1 ebuild.

Of course, it is now in portage as dev-tex/texmfind and it comes with a nice man page for a more advanced usage than this toy example.

Now it seems most people have no reason not to switch to TeX Live, and I really recommend everybody to migrate. Moreover, TeX Live should be ready to go stable now and I would really appreciate some feedback from stable users running TeX Live as a TeX distribution instead of teTeX. This can also include filling a stable request on bugs.gentoo.org as this will probably ensure that I have not messed up anything with the dependencies and that I’m not mistaken when saying it should be ready to go stable.

For those who do not read -dev ml and might be interested in testing / helping:

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been working on modular texlive ebuilds[1], based on work found on b.g.o and pclouds work [2]. I wanted to send a mail earlier but time was lacking to fix the few remaining bugs.

I’ve had several success reports, and fixed the remaining (known) bugs there. I was thinking that it might be time to integrate this to the official tree, as a first shoot under package.mask.

The layout I’ve been using is a modular one:
- texlive-core package that builds the required binaries. That’s the only one that should be system dependant.
- several texmf modules based on upstream “collection”s (that’s how they call them) that agregates packages from CTAN in some more or less independant categories.

I’ve tried to remove as much as possible programs from the -core package, as long as they had their independant ebuilds equivalent and added the independant packages as dependencies of the texlive meta ebuild.

As you might guess it, having a modular layout can give dependencies problems. I was thinking about adding some (new style) virtuals to handle them :
- virtual/tex-base : programs that need only standard tex binaries or libraires (like kpathsea) but do not need it to compile latex files for example. There are a very very few of such packages and are ok with the next virtual, so I dunno if that one is really necessary, apart for reducing deps to the minimal set.
- virtual/latex-base : packages that need a (basic) latex, for example to compile their documentation. This virtual will help preventing from having circular dependencies between ebuilds (esp. the meta ebuild and its dependencies)
- virtual/latex-full : a full latex distribution installation, what other tex distributions like tetex provide. This one can use the current old style virtual (virtual/tetex) instead of being a new one, but the name is better imho.
So in the end, only latex-base is strictly required to merge this. tex-base and latex-full have their improvements but can benefit from discussion here.

Everything in [1] could still benefit of any kind of reviewing, especially the eclasses. I’ll also need to write a more decent guide on how to use/switch to those ebuilds, so that it can be put on the website.

The only (known) bug still left so far is that metapost (mpost) isn’t useable on hardened kernel, it gets killed. It is not a regression from tetex, but apparently nobody ever noticed that. Now that ebuilds generate the format files themselves in src_compile (this way we can improve QA imho), instead of having texmf-update doing it in pkg_postinst, some ebuilds will fail to install instead of silently not creating the format file. (though texmf-update will still recreate the formats so that they get updated with the texmf tree)
Something that annoys me is the license : there is [3], [4] and [5], so GPL-2 might probably be fine, but I’m definitely not a lawyer…

In the (very hypothetic) case where nobody would have anything to add there, I’ll start merging this to the main tree, but definitely not until the next week as I’ll be away from wednesday to sunday.

And of course, many thanks to all the people who helped there: the early testers when documentation was lacking but not bugs, the people who suggested improvements (be it to ebuilds, the packaging layout or documentation), bug fixes, reported bugs, or just mailed me about a successful installation.

Now a question to arch teams : Should I keyword this for systems I’ve tested it or just add without keywords and let you do another layer of checks ? I’ve been using it on ~x86 (and hardenend but mpost had problems), ~amd64 and ~ppc64 (this one has some missing deps, but don’t worry I’ll poke you as soon as I’ll have done extra checks ).

As a side note, I’ll have to send 1.3k+ files to distfiles-local as upstream does not provide versionned names of the source files, for a total of ~700-800M. Since this is huge, I hope infra has no particular objection to it.

[1] http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/aballier/
[2] http://dev.gentoo.org/~pclouds/texlive/overlay/
[3] http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/LICENSE.TL?view=markup
[4] http://www.tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/LICENSE.CTAN?view=markup
[5] http://www.tug.org/texlive/copying.html

There are now two x264-svn ebuilds in ~arch :

media-libs/x264-svn : this one installs the library, headers and pkgconfig files needed by the other packages (for ex. ffmpeg)

media-video/x264-svn-encoder : x264 encoder that was previously installed with x264-svn and a gtk use flag with which you can install a gtk frontend to this encoder.

Why that ? Eh, let’s have a look at it :
- x264 encoder can use gpac for mp4 output
- gpac can use ffmpeg
- ffmpeg can use x264 libs

If you want all of these features, then you hit a circular dependency problem.

Moreover, previously if you wanted to install x264 gtk frontend then libx264.so would have been linked to x11… why ? I don’t know, it’s not needed. Now this is no longer a problem since they are different packages.

Hi,

this is my first blog post, trying to use categories