Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Peng Chang (Charles)" <chp516 AT gmail.com>]

Dear all,

I'd like to raise two issues that may have been forgotten by most of
you. The first one is the merged gcc spell; the second one is the
texlive spell.

I believe the reason that the merged gcc spell doesn't get into master
is the transition issue. IMHO, this is not a problem at all.

As I mentioned in an earlier message, I resolved the circular dependency
by doing:
cast -r gmp and disable c++
cast gcc with g++
cast -r gmp and enable c++

I admit that this process is not within normal user experience, but I
also have to point out that from what I can see from bug 15166, updating
gcc, g++, gmp using the traditional split spells causes problems that
need unusual fixes as well. In this sense, I suggest that merge the
combined spell into master is no more annoying than maintaining the
traditional spells. And thanks to the immense work by ruskie, I believe
the merged spell is as stable as the split ones and better by design.
We also have bootstrappable Ada tarballs for both x86 and x86_64.


The texlive{,-texmf} spells are both buildable and usable now, but there
are still work to be done in order to integrate them into the grimoire.

If we have enough people and time to work on a TeX distribution built up
by spells, we need to add a lot of providers such as LATEX PDFTEX
JADETEX etc. to meet the various dependency needs. However, building a
custom TeX distribution is somewhat discouraged by TeX supporting
software developers.

If we will never have such a custom TeX distribution, we only need to
add TEXDIST and JADETEX providers, the latter of which texlive has while
tetex doesn't have, or we simply deprecate tetex and jadetex spells, and
replace all depends with texlive.

I expect that the merged gcc spell find its way into master soon. I also
hope that we figure out how to integrate texlive into the grimoire
before long.

Regards,
Charles