I've been looking at texlive and am trying to figure out how to proceed. The first thing to note is that upstream distribution links their binaries statically, at least as far as the texlive libraries go (there are two).
There are a huge number of programs in the livetex distribution. I don't know how many are needed by most users, but I suspect few. A full distribution has 344 programs (78M - over half just for xetex and bibtex) and the full installation is about 3G with all the support files. The upstream default installer puts all files in /usr/local/texlive/2011/, but can be adjusted to taste. It then has the user update the PATH, MANPATH, and INFOPATH to account for the installation location. We could do that by creating a 3 line script in /etc/profile.d or appending it to /etc/profile.d/extrapaths.sh. Option 1. Use the upstream installer but suggest the use /opt/texlive or some variant instead. Option 2. Refer to the texlive web site and suggest users just use their installer and let it go at that. I know this goes against the general LFS philosophy, but the package is so large I can't feel confident about getting the setup right. Building the executables does not seem to be a problem, but making the configuration files right requires more research and time than I really want to do. Option 3. Use the upstream installer for a base installation and also build the executables and libraries. The LFS built executables, and optionally libraries, could then be installed over the downloaded executables. This is similar to what we do for JDK. Option 4. Yet another option is to completely remove TeX from the book. It is usually referenced in other packages to rebuild documentation. I really doubt many users do that. Right now I lean towards option 3, but need to get feedback. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
