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10 years TeX Live in Debian
I recently dug through my history of involvement with TeX (Live), and found out that in January there are a lot of “anniversaries” I should celebrate: 14 years ago I started building binaries for TeX Live, 11 years ago I proposed the packaging TeX Live for Debian, 10 years ago the TeX Live packages entered Debian. There are other things to celebrate next year (2017), namely the 10 year anniversary of the (not so new anymore) infrastructure – in short tlmgr – of TeX Live packaging, but this will come later. In this blog post I want to concentrate on my involvement in TeX Live and Debian.
Those of you not interested in boring and melancholic look-back onto history can safely skip reading this one. For those a bit interested in the history of TeX in Debian, please read on.
Debian releases and TeX systemsThe TeX system of choice has been for long years teTeX, curated by Thomas Esser. Digging through the Debian Archive and combining it with changelog entries as well as personal experiences since I joined Debian, here is a time line of TeX in Debian, all to my best knowledge.
| DATE | VERSION | NAME | TETEX/TEX LIVE | MAINTAINERS |
| 1993-96 | <1 | ? | ? | Christoph Martin |
| 6/1996 | 1.1 | Buzz | ? | |
| 12/1996 | 1.2 | Rec | ? | |
| 6/1997 | 1.3 | Bo | teTeX 0.4 | |
| 7/1998 | 2.0 | Ham | teTeX 0.9 | |
| 3/1999 | 2.1 | Slink | teTeX 0.9.9N | |
| 8/2000 | 2.2 | Potato | teTeX 1.0 | |
| 7/2002 | 3.0 | Woody | teTeX 1.0 | |
| 6/2005 | 3.1 | Sarge | teTeX 2.0 | Atsuhito Kohda |
| 4/2007 | 4.0 | Etch | teTeX 3.0, TeX Live 2005 | Frank Küster, NP |
| 2/2009 | 5.0 | Lenny | TeX Live 2007 | NP |
| 2/2011 | 6.0 | Squeeze | TeX Live 2009 | |
| 5/2013 | 7.0 | Whezzy | TeX Live 2012 | |
| 4/2015 | 8.0 | Jessie | TeX Live 2014 | |
| ??? | ??? | Stretch | TeX Live ≥2015 |
The history of TeX in Debian is thus split more or less in 10 years teTeX, and 10 years TeX Live. While I cannot check back to the origins, my guesses are that already in the very first releases (te)TeX was included. The first release I can confirm (via the Debian archive) shipping teTeX is the release Bo (June 1997). Maintainership during the first 10 years showed some fluctuation: The first years/releases (till about 2002) were dominated by Christoph Martin with Adrian Bunk and few others, who did most packaging work on teTeX version 1. After this Atsuhito Kohda with help from Hilmar Preusse and some people brought teTeX up to version 2, and from 2004 to 2007 Frank Küster, again with help of Hilmar Preusse and some other, took over most of the work on teTeX. Other names appearing throughout the changelog are (incomplete list) Julian Gilbey, Ralf Stubner, LaMont Jones, and C.M Connelly (and many more bug-reporters and fixers).
Looking at the above table I have to mention the incredible amount of work that both Atsuhito Kohda and Frank Küster have put into the teTeX packages, and many of their contributions have been carried over into the TeX Live packages. While there haven’t been many releases during their maintainership, their work has inspired and supported the packaging of TeX Live to a huge extend.
Start of TeX LiveI got involved in TeX Live back in 2002 when I started building binaries for the alpha-linux architecture. I can’t remember when I first had the idea to package TeX Live for Debian, but here is a time line from my first email to the Debian Developers mailing list concerning TeX Live, to the first accepted upload:
| DATE | SUBJECT/LINK | COMMENT |
| 2005-01-11 | binaries for different architectures in debian packages | The first question concerning packaging TeX Live, about including pre-built binaries |
| 2005-01-25 | Debian-TeXlive Proposal II | A better proposal, but still including pre-built binaries |
| 2005-05-17 | Proposal for a tex-base package | Proposal for tex-base, later tex-common, as basis for both teTeX and TeX live packages |
| 2015-06-10 | Bug#312897: ITP: texlive | ITP bug for TeX Live |
| 2005-09-17 | Re: Take over of texinfo/info packages | Taking over texinfo which was somehow orphaned started here |
| 2005-11-28 | Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED | My answer to the rejection by ftp-master of the first upload. This email sparked a long discussion about packaging and helped improve the naming of packages (but not really the packaging itself). |
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