pTeX: request to integrate patches into texlive and retire the teTeX-based distribution

[mojca (Mojca Miklavec)]

The ​pTeX port is currently based on unmaintained/obsolete and horribly outdated tetex distribution which saw the last release in 2006 (see ​http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/obsolete/systems/unix/teTeX/3.0/distrib and ​http://www.tug.org/tetex/):

I (Thomas Esser) have decided not to make new releases of teTeX any more (May 2006). The information below might get out of date as time goes by. I suggest anybody interested in teTeX to join the TeX Live project.

and it's also based on a lot of other outdated software (dvipdfmx underwent a lot of changes recently for example). Last time when pTeX made any package updates was probably in March 2011 (r76924).

This means that:

• pTeX cannot be compiled with clang
• neither pTeX not tetex can be patched easily
• there are many unnecessary conflicts (see #39705) since pTeX provides copies of the same (but outdated) utilities that are already part of TeX Live and in most cases there is no need for a copy (if the utility from texlive-bin wasn't in direct conflict with pTeX)
• there are random other failures, like a failure to run doxygen (#26002)
• often duplicate patches are needed (​pTeX/dvipdfmx-clang-%2339334.diff vs. ​texlive-bin/patch-svn31700-dvipdfmx.diff for example)
• it makes supporting pTeX a lot more difficult

These tradeoffs were needed in the beginning, but now TeX Live offers an extensive support for pTeX with maintained and up-to-date dependencies. And if anything is missing, I believe that it could easily be added either upstream or as a really tiny set of additions or patches (rather than as a full-blown distribution conflicting with everything else).

Last time when I asked (July 2011), Takanori-san mentioned the following drawbacks of TeX Live for Japanese users:

• updmap(-sys) in TeXLive doesn't support KanjiMap extensions.
• xdvi in TeXLive doesn't support (=cannot preview) Japanese DVI which is produced by ptex.
• Due to its license issues, TeXLive doesn't contain pLaTeX 2.09 macros.
• It doesn't contain otf.sty (yet).

but there is a high chance that these problems are solved already; and if they are not, they all seem doable.

There are also a bunch of resources about pTeX integration in TeX Live and testing packages, see ​http://tutimura.ath.cx/ptexlive/?tlptexlive%A5%EA%A5%DD%A5%B8%A5%C8%A5%EA for example.

I would really like to request trying to figure out what exactly is missing in TeX Live packages and making sure that pTeX would only provide the missing pieces without conflicting with any of the TeX Live packages.

I'm willing to help solving packaging issues (I have some insight into how TeX Live works), but I'm not competent in understanding or solving Japanese-specific issues which is why the help from maintainer of pTeX is of crucial importance.

I also added Norbert to CC. He is fluent in Japanes, takes care pTeX integration into TeX Live and also makes TeX Live packages for Debian, so he should be able to help if there are any problems.