[AUCTeX-devel] Re: Adding preview-latex support to Fedora Extra package of auctex

[David Kastrup]

"Jonathan Underwood" <address@hidden> writes:

> Apologies for the email to yourself directly, but I'm a bit pushed
> for time and haven't subscribed to the auctex-devel mailing list.

Mail to the list arrives even from non-members, after I moderate it
through.  And the latency is not worse than writing to myself.

In this particular case it is not really helpful to address just me,
since I am not using an RPM-based distribution.  So I am taking the
liberty of forwarding this to the list.

> Anyway, from reading the archives I noticed you were concerned that
> the Fedora Extras package was stripping out preview-latex:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/auctex-devel/2006-01/msg00042.html
>
> Over the weekend I brewed up a patch to rectify the situation -
> details here:
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=189728

Have you taken an actual look at the current spec file from AUCTeX
itself in CVS or the latest "SuSE" src RPM package?  It reportedly
works with Fedora, too.

> I thought you'd be interested to see the updated spec file since you
> have mentioned in the thread above including spec files in the
> distribution.

I have glanced through the Fedora Extras spec file, since we don't do
a too convincing job of putting our "Advice for package providers" in
the AUCTeX documentation to work in our own spec file.  However, it
seems to me like Fedora's own spec file does an even worse job even
after your fixes.  And you are missing out on providing a lot of
features that are expected to be available on Fedora when
preview-latex (or the LaTeX part of it) is installed (for the sake of
LyX et al), and on obsoletions and conflicts (such as a preexisting
preview package).  And the package will conflict with teTeX 3.0 which
has its own preview.sty.

So before you invest further work into this, you might want to
consider looking at the existing spec file in development (or the SuSE
source RPM we provide on AUCTeX's download area which has a slightly
more up to date specfile than is present in the last released
tarball), and also the guidelines for packaging AUCTeX we put together
in its documentation, since we already _have_ invested time and work
and thought in that matter and there is little point in not making use
of it.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum