Rearranging applications on Slackware

[jo...@wexfordpress.com]

I suggest that the thoroughly obsolete Tetex distribution be removed
from Slackware. I use TeX regularly in my publishing business but I
use the TeXlive distribution of that suite which is updated annually.
No serious user of TeX will settle for Tetex. I understand and accept
that TeXlive has grown too big for inclusion in the Slackware
distribution. Slack users can handle that chore for themselves.

I also use Scribus in my publishing activity but I have arranged to
run downloads and compiles of both the stable 1.4.3 and the
developmental 1.50 versions nightly. I may have downloaded some
libraries to help with Scribus, but I don't remember now.

Slackware offers a current version of Gimp. No problem there. Quanta
Plus has been restored to KDE, so that is a step forward.

The fly in the ointment is the lack of Inkscape. I actually had to
install a separate Kubuntu (ugh) partition just to gain access to this
needed program. There is a Slackbuild version of Inkscape but it
requires the installation of libraries, some of which require other
libraries, and at least one of the latter requires an oddball
download package. I can't get my Inkscape compile to recognize them
even after Slackbuild downloads and compiles and ldconfig runs.

So my request boils down to this: delete Tetex and put in its place
Inkscape. Then I can run my publication business without booting
Kubuntu now and then. And no one will miss Tetex.


John Culleton
Slack user since 1996

[Jim Diamond]

On 2013-05-07 at 10:54 ADT, jo...@wexfordpress.com <jo...@wexfordpress.com> wrote:

> The fly in the ointment is the lack of Inkscape. I actually had to
> install a separate Kubuntu (ugh) partition just to gain access to this
> needed program. There is a Slackbuild version of Inkscape but it
> requires the installation of libraries, some of which require other
> libraries, and at least one of the latter requires an oddball
> download package. I can't get my Inkscape compile to recognize them
> even after Slackbuild downloads and compiles and ldconfig runs.

John,

I'm not sure what (specifically) your problem is, but I can tell you
that I installed inkscape with no problems.

A long time ago I wrote a program which d/l's the necessary files,
runs the slackbuild, and installs the resulting package. With that
program I just type
slackbuild BeautifulSoup lxml numpy
slackbuild gc gsl mm-common libsigc++ glibmm
slackbuild graphviz cairomm pangomm atkmm gtkmm inkscape
and that's it.

(As I recall, some of those are not quick to compile, but since I
don't have to sit and watch, that's not an issue.)

If you are really stuck, and would like my packages (64-bit only), let
me know and I'll put them somewhere from which you can d/l them.

> So my request boils down to this: delete Tetex and put in its place
> Inkscape. Then I can run my publication business without booting
> Kubuntu now and then. And no one will miss Tetex.

I seem to recall a discussion which may have revealed that there are
some packages which use TeX to process their documentation, and thus
there needs to be some version of TeX available on the system for it
to be self-consistent. Or something like that.
I suggested installing the tetex-equivalent subset of texlive, but
that suggestion was not enthusiastically embraced. :-(

Cheers.

Jim

[Michael Black]

On Tue, 7 May 2013, Jim Diamond wrote:


>> So my request boils down to this: delete Tetex and put in its place
>> Inkscape. Then I can run my publication business without booting
>> Kubuntu now and then. And no one will miss Tetex.
> I seem to recall a discussion which may have revealed that there are
> some packages which use TeX to process their documentation, and thus
> there needs to be some version of TeX available on the system for it
> to be self-consistent. Or something like that.
> I suggested installing the tetex-equivalent subset of texlive, but
> that suggestion was not enthusiastically embraced. :-(
>

Yes, there was something like that here before.

But, though I hate to say it, this isn't really the place for requests.
If someone helping with Slackware sees something, they might pass it on
(you see their names in the changelog), but it's not reliable. That
Linuxquestion site, or whatever it is, seems to be the place for
interaction with Slackware. Witness my post a couple of weeks back about
an entry in the changelog about the next release of Slack, there had been
a discussion on that website about versions to go with next, and we were
never consulted.

So if someone is wanting to make a serious comment about what Slackware
needs or needs removed, this isn't the place for it.

Michael

[jo...@wexfordpress.com]

On May 7, 12:45 pm, Jim Diamond <Jim.Diam...@deletethis.AcadiaU.ca>
wrote:

I'll give it a try. Please send the file to me at john (at)
wexfordpress.com or tell me where I cna download it/them.
I have a Kubuntu partition with Inkscape but after I added some stuff
it stopped working.
Possibly there is a hex on me or my site.

Thanks,
John Culleton

[Jim Diamond]

Done.

> I have a Kubuntu partition with Inkscape but after I added some
> stuff it stopped working. Possibly there is a hex on me or my site.

Hmmm... I hope not, I didn't hex-proof my script. I'd guess that it
is a KDE or an Ubuntu problem.

Jim

[Peter Chant]

On 05/07/2013 02:54 PM, jo...@wexfordpress.com wrote:

> So my request boils down to this: delete Tetex and put in its place
> Inkscape. Then I can run my publication business without booting
> Kubuntu now and then. And no one will miss Tetex.

sbopkg and the associated build queues are a great help with inkscape.

Pete

[Dan C]

All true, and another possible (better?) avenue is to email Patrick
directly.


--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
"Bother!" said Pooh, as he shot another Spotted Owl.
Usenet Improvement Project: http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/
Thanks, Obama: http://brandybuck.site40.net/pics/politica/thanks.jpg

[Tralfaz]

On Tue, 07 May 2013 06:54:17 -0700, jo...@wexfordpress.com wrote:


<snip>

> Quanta
> Plus has been restored to KDE, so that is a step forward.
>

Meh...it isn't even recognizable anymore as Quanta Plus, unfortunately
and to my dismay. Because of that, I had to fall back to Bluefish, which
is 'okay' but not anywhere as good as Quanta+ *used* to be before it got
gobbled up by KDE.

[Kees Theunissen]

jo...@wexfordpress.com wrote:

> Slackware offers a current version of Gimp. No problem there. Quanta
> Plus has been restored to KDE, so that is a step forward.

About that presumed step forward:

(From Slackware Current ChangeLog for x86_64, Tue May 14 06:33:30 UTC 2013)
kde/quanta-29a3f8e_20111223git-x86_64-2.txz: Removed.
I think this is finally dead since it no longer compiles against the new
version of kdevplatform.


Regards,

Kees.

--
Kees Theunissen.

[Robby Workman]

On 2013-05-07, Jim Diamond <Jim.D...@deletethis.AcadiaU.ca> wrote:
>
> I seem to recall a discussion which may have revealed that there are
> some packages which use TeX to process their documentation, and thus
> there needs to be some version of TeX available on the system for it
> to be self-consistent. Or something like that.
> I suggested installing the tetex-equivalent subset of texlive, but
> that suggestion was not enthusiastically embraced. :-(

Well, it wasn't clear to me of a *good* way to do that. As usual,
I simply hadn't found it yet :-) As it turns out, Edd Barrett,
OpenBSD's texlive port maintainer, wrote a nice tool in ruby to
parse the texlive package database and extract filelists based on
various schemes/collections of packages. After a bit of tweaking
by Vincent Batts to make it work with ruby 1.9.x, and a small bit
of playing around with the resulting filelists, I have got a tetex
like subset of texlive. Sadly, it's still ~ 300MB of texmf, which
is in addition to 25M of main texlive package (172MB source), and
the remainder of a full texmf set is almost another 200MB, so it's
still a lot bigger than what we have now in tetex. Maybe it's a
valid option to consider for the distribution now, but we'll see.
At the very least, we're closer than we used to be, right? :)

-RW

[Joost Kremers]

Robby Workman wrote:
> [...] I have got a tetex

> like subset of texlive. Sadly, it's still ~ 300MB of texmf, which
> is in addition to 25M of main texlive package (172MB source), and
> the remainder of a full texmf set is almost another 200MB, so it's
> still a lot bigger than what we have now in tetex. Maybe it's a
> valid option to consider for the distribution now, but we'll see.
> At the very least, we're closer than we used to be, right? :)

Have you looked at BasicTeX?[1] It's a package for OS X, so it couldn't
be used directly, but perhaps it can provide some hints on how to create
a small TeX package based on TeXLive. The current BasicTeX, based on
TeXLive 2013, is about 85MB as a download package. (Though I admit I
have no idea how much that expands to...)

The nice thing about BasicTeX is that it contains tlmgr, so that users
can install additional packages from TeXLive should they need to.



[1] http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

--
Joost Kremers joostk...@fastmail.fm
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

[Jim Diamond]

On 2013-07-04 at 04:36 ADT, Robby Workman <newsg...@rlworkman.net> wrote:
> On 2013-05-07, Jim Diamond <Jim.D...@deletethis.AcadiaU.ca> wrote:
>>
>> I seem to recall a discussion which may have revealed that there are
>> some packages which use TeX to process their documentation, and thus
>> there needs to be some version of TeX available on the system for it
>> to be self-consistent. Or something like that.
>> I suggested installing the tetex-equivalent subset of texlive, but
>> that suggestion was not enthusiastically embraced. :-(
>
>
> Well, it wasn't clear to me of a *good* way to do that. As usual,
> I simply hadn't found it yet :-) As it turns out, Edd Barrett,
> OpenBSD's texlive port maintainer, wrote a nice tool in ruby to
> parse the texlive package database and extract filelists based on
> various schemes/collections of packages. After a bit of tweaking
> by Vincent Batts to make it work with ruby 1.9.x, and a small bit
> of playing around with the resulting filelists, I have got a tetex
> like subset of texlive.

Did you consider the subset of texlive which the texlive people call
"teTeX scheme"?
That is, when you run install-tl and select 's' to pick a scheme,
there is one called "teTeX scheme". Rather than extracting file lists
and playing with ruby, this would give you the installation right
there and then. (But maybe you are doing more than I understand from
your paragraph above.)

It is big, though. Perhaps the "basic scheme (plain and latex)" would
be suitable, it is only 131 MB.

> Sadly, it's still ~ 300MB of texmf, which is in addition to 25M of
> main texlive package (172MB source), and the remainder of a full
> texmf set is almost another 200MB, so it's still a lot bigger than
> what we have now in tetex. Maybe it's a valid option to consider
> for the distribution now, but we'll see. At the very least, we're
> closer than we used to be, right? :)

Ummm... maybe.

I can only imagine that anyone who uses TeX probably wants more than
what Slackware will distribute as a minimal TeX system. But if one of
the texlive pre-defined schemes worked for Slackware, and it could be
easily extended by TeX users, maybe everyone would be happy.

Cheers.
Jim

[Robby Workman]

On 2013-07-05, Jim Diamond <Jim.D...@deletethis.AcadiaU.ca> wrote:
> On 2013-07-04 at 04:36 ADT, Robby Workman <newsg...@rlworkman.net> wrote:
>> On 2013-05-07, Jim Diamond <Jim.D...@deletethis.AcadiaU.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>> I seem to recall a discussion which may have revealed that there are
>>> some packages which use TeX to process their documentation, and thus
>>> there needs to be some version of TeX available on the system for it
>>> to be self-consistent. Or something like that.
>>> I suggested installing the tetex-equivalent subset of texlive, but
>>> that suggestion was not enthusiastically embraced. :-(
>>
>>
>> Well, it wasn't clear to me of a *good* way to do that. As usual,
>> I simply hadn't found it yet :-) As it turns out, Edd Barrett,
>> OpenBSD's texlive port maintainer, wrote a nice tool in ruby to
>> parse the texlive package database and extract filelists based on
>> various schemes/collections of packages. After a bit of tweaking
>> by Vincent Batts to make it work with ruby 1.9.x, and a small bit
>> of playing around with the resulting filelists, I have got a tetex
>> like subset of texlive.
>
> Did you consider the subset of texlive which the texlive people call
> "teTeX scheme"?
> That is, when you run install-tl and select 's' to pick a scheme,
> there is one called "teTeX scheme".

Yes, that tetex scheme plus its runtime files:
300M texlive-texmf-minimal-20130530.tar.xz

> Rather than extracting file lists
> and playing with ruby, this would give you the installation right
> there and then. (But maybe you are doing more than I understand from
> your paragraph above.)

Yeah, ruby is really irrelevant - the point is that someone else wrote
a nice tool to print out exactly what is included in a given scheme or
collection of packages. In essence, instead of using tlmgr to install
it, I used this other tool to tell me what would have been installed
and then grabbed those things out of the gigantic texlive texmf tarball
distributed by the TL folks.

Could I have written something myself to do that? Yes. However, I
*really* did not want to do that, which is why I haven't. It's been on
my TODO list, but I just haven't gathered up enough give-a-damn to
actually do it. It just so happened that I was messing with an openbsd
installation and stumbled across the texlive port, well, the rest is
mostly history :-)

> It is big, though. Perhaps the "basic scheme (plain and latex)" would
> be suitable, it is only 131 MB.

I wish. Even the tetex scheme (what openbsd (and I) have termed as
"minimal") isn't sufficient for some things, e.g. it's not enough to
*build* the main texlive binary package with xindy enabled.

>> Sadly, it's still ~ 300MB of texmf, which is in addition to 25M of
>> main texlive package (172MB source), and the remainder of a full
>> texmf set is almost another 200MB, so it's still a lot bigger than
>> what we have now in tetex. Maybe it's a valid option to consider
>> for the distribution now, but we'll see. At the very least, we're
>> closer than we used to be, right? :)
> Ummm... maybe.
>
> I can only imagine that anyone who uses TeX probably wants more than
> what Slackware will distribute as a minimal TeX system. But if one of
> the texlive pre-defined schemes worked for Slackware, and it could be
> easily extended by TeX users, maybe everyone would be happy.

Yes, I agree on the first part, and so I'm not in favor of shipping a
stripped down texlive installation that isn't extensible by the user.
I don't know if it's going to be possible, but given the current options,
I'd like to just merge the "minimal" and "full" (which is actually the
rest of the texmf after minimal is pulled out) into a single ~500MB
package and be done with it.

If tlmgr could be told to put stuff in a user-specific place (instead of
the OS domain), then that would be the best of outcomes. We could ship
a truly minimal texlive installation, and users who need more could
use tlmgr to get it. More importantly, users could update various parts
of texlive without stomping on the ones installed by our package.

-RW

[Robby Workman]

On 2013-07-04, Joost Kremers <joostk...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Robby Workman wrote:
>> [...] I have got a tetex
>> like subset of texlive. Sadly, it's still ~ 300MB of texmf, which
>> is in addition to 25M of main texlive package (172MB source), and
>> the remainder of a full texmf set is almost another 200MB, so it's
>> still a lot bigger than what we have now in tetex. Maybe it's a
>> valid option to consider for the distribution now, but we'll see.
>> At the very least, we're closer than we used to be, right? :)
>
> Have you looked at BasicTeX?[1] It's a package for OS X, so it couldn't
> be used directly, but perhaps it can provide some hints on how to create
> a small TeX package based on TeXLive. The current BasicTeX, based on
> TeXLive 2013, is about 85MB as a download package. (Though I admit I
> have no idea how much that expands to...)

Well, it certainly looks interesting... I'd be curious as to how they
manage to get a "functional for most users" laTeX out of it :/

> The nice thing about BasicTeX is that it contains tlmgr, so that users
> can install additional packages from TeXLive should they need to.
>
> [1] http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

Well, this part alone makes it worth checking out - I wonder where
tlmgr puts stuff...

-RW

[Jim Diamond]

I guess I'm missing why you didn't just let tlmgr install those files.
It seems you are saying that you used a tool to figure out what files
would be installed, and then you extracted those files from a tar file.
But if you let tlmgr do it, it would install those files and then also
run any programs it knows are necessary to make sure everything is set
up in a self-consistent way.

>> It is big, though. Perhaps the "basic scheme (plain and latex)" would
>> be suitable, it is only 131 MB.
> I wish. Even the tetex scheme (what openbsd (and I) have termed as
> "minimal") isn't sufficient for some things, e.g. it's not enough to
> *build* the main texlive binary package with xindy enabled.

I guess that's a problem, if xindy is needed.

>> I can only imagine that anyone who uses TeX probably wants more than
>> what Slackware will distribute as a minimal TeX system. But if one of
>> the texlive pre-defined schemes worked for Slackware, and it could be
>> easily extended by TeX users, maybe everyone would be happy.
> Yes, I agree on the first part, and so I'm not in favor of shipping a
> stripped down texlive installation that isn't extensible by the user.

Makes perfect sense.

> I don't know if it's going to be possible, but given the current options,
> I'd like to just merge the "minimal" and "full" (which is actually the
> rest of the texmf after minimal is pulled out) into a single ~500MB
> package and be done with it.

> If tlmgr could be told to put stuff in a user-specific place
> (instead of the OS domain), then that would be the best of outcomes.
> We could ship a truly minimal texlive installation, and users who
> need more could use tlmgr to get it. More importantly, users could
> update various parts of texlive without stomping on the ones
> installed by our package.

That last part sounds tricky. But maybe users who are sophisticated
enough to upgrade/add to the basic TeX installation can do so at their
own peril. This takes the TeX stuff outside of the Slackware package
management system, but given the frequent updates of things in
TeXlive, and the fact that everything is (can be) stored in one
subtree, having it outside the standard package management isn't all
that scary.

Cheers
Jim