Hi again, Norbert.

So here I am, writing my lecture notes on a machine on which I don't
usually TeX.  My personal format fails with an error about MnSymbol not
found, so I do

  $ apt-cache search mnsymbol
  texlive-fonts-extra - TeX Live: Additional fonts

Ouch.  200MB download, 600MB disk space.

Norbert, there are three font packages that are very useful when you're
trying to work around the lack of maths fonts -- these are newtx, newpx
and MnSymbol.  I really think they should be extracted from the
texlive-fonts-extra ghetto.

Sorry for the underful hbox in the paragraph above, I'm too lazy to reword
it.  Thanks for listening,

Hi Juliusz,
	tex-live@tug.org
I follow upstream collections to the word, and will not start
extracting and moving single packages, as long as this is not
done upstream in TeX Live.

I know that the big -extra collections are a bit a pain, but
I don't see many different options, but packaging each unit
by itself, which was rejected years ago (would increase the
number of Debian packages by 5000 or so .... not good out of
various reasons).

Hope that helps

Norbert

I've always known you're a wise man.

No way -- I'm on way too many mailing lists already.  I'll be very
grateful if you do that for me.

Hi Juliusz,

Hahaha, "Honig um den Mund schmieren"? Your German should be good enough
to understand this ;-)

No need to subscribe, just add "please Cc me" ... if you don't do it,
I *MIGHT* do it at some point in the future ;-)

Enjoy

Norbert

Nein, ich bin dead serious.  I keep begging my downstreams to avoid
distro-specific patches as much as possible, and to put their
modifications upstream.  (Especially since there've been cases where I've
replaced dozens of lines of distro-specific shell scripts by a few lines
of upstream code.)

No way.  You start by sending an innocent message, and you end up being
one of the main developers.

Please.

Hi everyone at tl,

we got a bug report down here at Debian suggestion to move
newtx and newpx to a different collection. As I follow upstream
TeX Live in this respect, I forward it to the list.

Please Cc your answers to the included Ccs.

Thanks

Norbert

In 2014, 200MB is noise level.  I can see no reason whatsoever to factor
out some subset of this.

Philip Taylor

Do what you want in Debian, of course.  (Do you exactly 100% follow the
TL collection constituents now?)

For TL, I see that c-fontsrecommended has txfonts and pxfonts.  Perhaps
I should exchange those with the newtx and newpx in extra, but I'm not
sure.  I have a feeling that an awful lot of documents use the original
*xfonts and it would just create needless churn.  Michael (Sharpe), do
you have an opinion here?

I don't want to just randomly add things to c-fontsrecommended.

karl

Yes, we follow it 100% (besides leaving out a few packages that
are packaged separately).

I agree. Only if there is good reason.

Norbert

Hi Juliusz,

    What about mnsymbol?  It's a fairly small package, and is a simple,
    hassle-free way to get a bunch of mathematical symbols that blend
    relatively well with many common fonts

I guess I don't have any overwhelming argument against it, but it would
be nice if I had a note from at least one other user that moving it from
one collection to the other would be a practical benefit.

My general feeling is that for pretty much any package X in a
collection C, there is an argument that it should be in collection C2
instead.  So in self-defense, I try to be conservative in such moves.

Best,
Karl

On 2014-10-10 at 22:00:55 +0000, Karl Berry wrote:

 > Hi Juliusz,
 >
 >     What about mnsymbol?  It's a fairly small package, and is a
 >     simple, hassle-free way to get a bunch of mathematical symbols
 >     that blend relatively well with many common fonts
 >
 > I guess I don't have any overwhelming argument against it, but it
 > would be nice if I had a note from at least one other user that
 > moving it from one collection to the other would be a practical
 > benefit.
 >
 > My general feeling is that for pretty much any package X in a
 > collection C, there is an argument that it should be in collection
 > C2 instead.  So in self-defense, I try to be conservative in such
 > moves.

IMO mnsymbol should be part of the collection containing all the other
math symbol fonts.  Whether it should be in texlive-fonts-extra or
in texlive-fonts-recommended is another thing.  But all math symbol
fonts should be in one and the same collection.  Otherwise the concept
of collections doesn't make sense anymore.

Regards,
  Reinhard