It is painful to install the latest version of Pandoc or TeXLive on
Ubuntu/Debian. It is not that you cannot do it, nor is it super difficult.
Sometimes you just need to prepare the giant building environment, and take a
relatively long time to compile packages from source. As someone who is always
impatient with software packages that are years behind their latest versions,
I'm trying to build the binaries for a few packages such as pandoc,
pandoc-citeproc, and TeXLive on the Travis CI platform and upload them to
back to this repository in the gh-pages branch. The main purpose is
for checking R packages with LaTeX dependencies or R Markdown v2 vignettes on
Travis CI (e.g. the crandalf project).
Unless you understand what I'm doing here, you are not recommended to download
the binaries built here and use them in production.
Yes, I understand the point and importance of "being stable", but I also like "cutting-edge" versions to be tested early and more frequently. From the perspective of users, they usually do not care about the versions of software at all until they are bitten by bugs or suddenly realize some cool new features some day. I just cannot stand hearing some known bugs biting users again and again simply because it is hard to upgrade software packages. Developers often ask for testing before releasing a package, but nobody actually listens or is willing to do it. I hope this repo can help us identify potential problems early in the latest version of Pandoc (well, I really wish we could find no problems).
There is no magic in .travis.yml:
- For Pandoc, everything was basically taken from http://pandoc.org/installing.html. Many thanks to the author and contributors of Pandoc for making such a great package, and also to the Travis CI team. I believe both have changed the world.
- For TeXLive, I just create a portable TeXLive tar ball, which is a minimal TeXLive installation named TinyTeX. To make sure Ubuntu no longer installs the official texlive packages, a dummy Debian package is built using @scottkosty's install-tl-ubuntu repo.
The binaries are served at https://travis-bin.yihui.org.