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TeXLive 2025 (2026)

Summary

TeX Live is intended to be a straightforward way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavors of Unix, including GNU/Linux and macOS, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world.

This change will update TeXLive in Fedora from 2023 to 2026, and move to a modular packaging approach that allows for more fine grained upgrades and maintenance.

Owner


Current status

Detailed Description

The Fedora "texlive" package is the largest RPM spec file in Fedora. While it was broken into two packages ("texlive" and "texlive-base") a few years ago, the "texlive" spec contained thousands of sources and was very difficult to maintain. Additionally, because all of the noarch components lived in a single SRPM, updating any component generated an update for _all_ noarch texlive components.

With this change, we update to the latest version of TeXLive (2026) but we also move to a modularized packaging system, which splits the "texlive" SPEC into a set of collection and scheme packages, reflecting the categorization that TeXLive upstream defines. Each collection package will package the immediate component dependencies as subpackages.

This will require 50+ new package reviews.

Note: This was initially proposed and implemented around TeXLive 2025, which landed in rawhide before the branching (and right in the middle of the rebuild, sorry), but due to some upstream changes in TeXLive 2026 that other components depended on, it was decided to update Fedora 44+ to TeXLive 2026.

Feedback

The alternatives to this change are: 

* Just update the existing texlive/texlive-base files to TeXLive 2026. While possible, it is very difficult to get a single spec file updated. In 2023, this took me several months. This time, I chose to invest time in developing a modular approach instead. I also created a set of python tools to generate these collection/scheme spec files, which I plan to open source (but not package in Fedora because that's just too meta).
* Leave TeXLive at the 2023 revision. This is not ideal and not in keeping with Fedora's "First" principle. Additionally, users have asked for the 2025/2026 update.

Benefit to Fedora

The modular packaging approach will make TeXLive easier to maintain and update in Fedora. It is my hope that other maintainers will feel more empowered to help maintain subsections of TeXLive that they care about, but even if not, it will be easier for _me_ to maintain it. This approach will also lower the number of updates pushed to Fedora users with any parts of TeXLive installed.

TeXLive 2026 provides a few key advantages: 

* It generates PDF-1.7 format files by default
* Scaling fonts to >= 2048pt now results in an error message, instead of (unhandled) arithmetic overflow or silent changing of the user's value
* Improvements to LuaTeX and pdfTeX
* Many individual components have had updates since TeXLive 2026.

Scope

  • Proposal owners:

50+ package reviews for the new modular set of texlive packages. These spec files, while sometimes long, are simple. None of them have %build sections, and their %install sections are 95% code copying, and 5% patching or file delete/move operations.

None of them depend on other Fedora package changes, though, we will recommend a change to emacs-auctex to better detect the current set of TeX provides.


  • Other developers:

With the exception of emacs-auctex, we do not anticipate any other developers will need to make changes. The goal is for any TeX documentation in other Fedora packages to continue to render and save without issue.

While a mass rebuild is not required, it has been beneficial in the past to identify bugs in TeXLive. Because the scope of TeXLive within Fedora is just generated documentation in TeX format, failures here are usually worked around by providing a pre-rendered document.


  • Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)
  • Alignment with the Fedora Strategy:

TeXLive provides a broad set of internationalization support, allowing people to work in their native languages. Keeping TeXLive current helps Fedora "Reach the World".

Upgrade/compatibility impact

Users may wish to delete their local cache in ~/.texlive2023. After upgrade, a new ~/.texlive2025 directory will be created and used.


Early Testing (Optional)

Do you require 'QA Blueprint' support? N

How To Test

The "texlive-base" package contains some local testing to ensure it is being built with a working TeXLive environment, and it also runs the full upstream test suite. No special hardware or data is needed to test. Expected outcome is that TeX documents render properly.


User Experience

Users will get the latest version of the TeXLive components and system. Users will also get _less_ TeXLive package updates from Fedora.

Dependencies

Fedora packages with TeX-format documentation which render that documentation as part of the build process. No other changes outside of the TeXLive system are necessary for this change.

Contingency Plan

  • Contingency mechanism: Stay on TeXLive 2023, maybe eventually update the single spec in time.
  • Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
  • Blocks release? No


Documentation

Release Notes

Fedora has updated TeXLive to 2026. It has also split out its packaging by collections in order to improve maintainer sanity and minimize texlive package updates to end users.

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