On 15 October 2016 at 00:03, Tomasz Kłoczko <kloczko.tomasz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> "TeX live is maintained IMO by real MORONS." > >> is what you wrote. > > Yes it is. > > Probably you never had occasion to have closer look what exactly is > maintained in texlive source tree. > I had fist time been trying to contemplate what exactly is texlive tree > about 9 years ago. > What was scarry 9 years ago now is even more scary today. > Will try to present you what is in texlive today over now available rpm > packages. What exactly are you using TeX for? The following examples suggest you aren't very clear on its uses: > So lets go alphabetically: > > Name : texlive-ESIEEcv > Summary : Curriculum vitae for French use > Description : > The package allows the user to set up a curriculum vitae as a > French employer will expect. > > Package contains style template to write some CV. Using google you can find > few examples of how it looks like. > Number of google results: ~2.9k. I can give anyone £10 to anyone who in last > 5 years been using this template installed on any Linux distro installed > from packages to wrote own CV. > Style templates are how LaTeX is supposed to work, for a re-used document format you fill in various parameters in your .tex document and it generates the format for you, creating or adjusting your own style is more involved. Note this comes from CTAN, you don't need to install this package yourself, but if you require it it is much easier to install from a fedora package. > Name : texlive-allrunes > Summary : Fonts and LaTeX package for almost all runes > Description : > This large collection of fonts (in Adobe Type 1 format), with > the LaTeX package gives access to almost all runes ever used in > Europe. The bundle covers not only the main forms but also a > lot of varieties. > > Few questions: > What is the size of the cross section of the sets: "we are using Linux" and > "we uses runes fonts"? > Maybe few artist in whole word are using runes .. how many of them are using > Linux? "Artist"... TeX is largely used by academics, and the whether people wish to use runes (for example for books and papers) and are using TeX to do so are probably not independent factors. > Why those vectorised resources are only available as TeX users? > Why TeX is not prepared to use system wide Type1 font and is not able to > share those fonts with other applications? > Why most Type1/TTF fonts are at least served three times as: ghoscript > fonts, X11/Weyland fonts and TeX fonts? > Why TeX live is not able to share those fonts with other applications? Maybe > someone who what to quickly prepare some post card want to use those runes > as some funny markings? However probability that he/she will use TeX is > probably the same as probability that bucket of water left on open fire will > freeze (according to quantum physics probability of something like this is > greater than zero) and probably more likely will try to use LibreOffice. > Isn't it? TeX predates Type1 fonts, though most distributions support them, and is used for its typesetting abilities. The needs of someone who wants to do a little cultural appropriation for a quick postcard are going to be less stringent than someone who actually wants to use the language, but they'll be in luck, because there is a runic block in unicode and fonts that support it outside TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_(Unicode_block). > Does Fedora really need to regenerate package with these fonts every time > when someone will change even single bit in any TeX live resources? > > Name : texlive-a2ping > Summary : Advanced PS, PDF, EPS converter > Description : > a2ping is a Perl script command line utility written for Unix > that converts many raster image and vector graphics formats to > EPS or PDF and other page description formats. Accepted input > file formats are: PS (PostScript), EPS, PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, > PNM, BMP, GIF, LBM, XPM, PCX, TGA. Accepted output formats are: > EPS, PCL5, PDF, PDF1, PBM, PGM, PPM, PS, markedEPS, markedPS, > PNG, XWD, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, XPM. a2ping delegates the low- > level work to Ghostscript (GS), pdftops and sam2p. a2ping fixes > many glitches during the EPS to EPS conversion, so its output > is often more compatible and better embeddable than its input. > > If anyone today will need to convert any of those formats to EPS or PDF more > likely will use convert from ImageMagic. > Isn't it? >From its description this looks like an interface layer, since TeX's main use is producing pdf and eps it's not particularly surprising it has one. ImageMagick itself uses ghostscript. > I don't remember name of this TeX package but I'm almost 100% > sure that it is still in texlive tree somewhere. "The Package" > generates using metapost cube view with visable only one side, > two sides and EVEN THREE sides!!! 8-O > As example of generating some graphics it was obsolete in the > time when people started using Corel Draw in Win 3.11 era > (anyone remember this program?). I don't, but this hypothetical program would be a good example of literate programming. You can certainly draw a diagram in Inkscape, but if you have a large document with lots of these you now have a directory full of images and their source files, and changing them means editing these, getting the right one, replacing the included image. Doing this under source control becomes a real pain. More concrete example (one I know exists), packages to draw Feynman diagrams. If you're preparing a professional publication you don't want to be drawing these by hand. > Probably more than 50% (if not more than 80%) of the TeX live is like this. > Most of the resources should be archived and preserved for next generation > cyber archeologist however now they should not be served as regular rpm > packages because it will make look Fedora stupid ("who is more stupid? > someone who is stupid or someone else who follows stupid one?"). > > I'm pretty sure that someone who had this grand idea converting TeX packages > to rpm packages never red even 5% of the descriptions of those "packages" > stored in .tlpobj files or been trying to as themselves "do I really need to > package this TeX package as rpm one?" > > And now back to what I wrote about TeX maintainers. > TeX live is more like black hole sucking every bit of anything related to > TeX. Ones something stored in the tree doesn't matter is it still usefull or > not still will be "maintained". Those people are thinking that they are > doing great job but in reality as now TeX live holds probably almost > everything what was produced as TeX tool/example it shows how small this > world is. > TeX has been around since 1978, so that it hasn't sucked everything in yet suggests it's not really a black hole. Having put LaTeX to serious use in the past I've been pretty glad when I've found that a package or style is available as rpm, because maintaining a TeX install manually is not pretty. -- imalone http://ibmalone.blogspot.co.uk _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
