Changes/TeXLive2023

TeXLive2023

Summary

Update the TeXLive engines and components in Fedora to the 2023 version. This will improve TeX document processing, conversion, and internationalization, which is used by some Fedora packages (and users).

Owner

• Name: Tom Callaway
• Email: spotrh@gmail.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 39
• Last updated: 2023-03-24
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

The goal is to update Fedora to the latest available version of TeXLive (2023), including its large number of associated components.

This will resolve outstanding bugs in the existing TeXLive (2022) packages, add new features, improve performance, and expand internationalization support.

Benefit to Fedora

Updating to TeXLive 2023 brings the latest versions of the TeX engines and components into Fedora, which improves document rendering and conversion. A number of Fedora packages include TeX support, which depend on the TeXLive utilities.

In each TeXLive release, a large (hundreds) number of TeX components are updated, a significant (~100) number of new TeX components are added, and core functionality is enhanced and optimized.

Documents should render properly and export into various formats without issues.

Scope

• Proposal owners:

The necessary changes are contained to the texlive and texlive-base packages. These changes have already landed in rawhide.

• Other developers:

No changes should be necessary for other packagers/developers.

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Objectives:

It does not align with any current Objectives.

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Users will need to delete old TexLive 2022 cache in order to properly use TeXLive 2022 upon an upgrade. To do this, a user simply (and carefully) needs to run:

rm -rf ~/.texlive2022

A new ~/.texlive2023 directory will be generated and used when the user invokes TeXLive related functionality, but TeXLive will attempt to use the older cache directory and it may not work properly.

How To Test

Packagers who have packages that use TeX to generate documentation should simply attempt to rebuild their package in rawhide with the TeXLive 2023 packages. If it succeeds and the documents generated are correct, nothing further is necessary. If it fails or the documents generated are corrupted/damaged, please open a bug against the texlive component.

User Experience

The way that the user interacts with TeX/TeXLive does not change in this release. A very small number of components (~10) in TeXLive have been obsoleted and removed, but they have either been silently replaced by other functionality or were not replaced at all. The following subpackages were removed AND nothing provides their functionality in TeXLive 2023. Accordingly, they have been marked as obsolete in fedora-obsolete-packages:

• texlive-elegantbook
• texlive-elegantnote
• texlive-elegantpaper
• texlive-tablestyles
• texlive-tablestyles-doc
• texlive-pgf-cmykshadings (pgf now does CMYK natively, but in a different way)

Dependencies

While other packages in Fedora do depend on texlive component packages, this is almost always for build-time generation of documentation, and not in a traditional "linking to library" approach.

Packages with tex() or texlive dependencies should not need to make any changes to use TeXLive 2023.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Roll back to latest texlive/texlive-base 2022 packages.
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? N/A

Documentation

https://tug.org/texlive/bugs.html

Release Notes

Fedora 39 has updated its TeXLive support to 2023. Users who upgrade from older versions of Fedora and who have used TeXLive previously may need to delete the ~/.texlive2022 cache directory in order to have a working TeXLive environment. A new ~/.texlive2023 cache directory will be generated on first use of TeXLive 2023, but TeX will attempt to use older cache directories if they exist.