On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 11:38 AM, Martin Costabel wrote: > Mojca Miklavec wrote: > [] >> >> Maybe one could take a look at how ports have incorporated texlive, >> and follow their scheme (so that it does not need to be built entirely >> from scratch). > > I guess if and when it will be done, this will be one of the routes to take. > There is also debian who have texlive packages. But: > > - Having Fink texlive packages will not satisfy many users who want to keep > their texlive from the texlive or mactex disk image and who want to use Fink > only for installing extras like liliypond. I don't know if the macports tex > packages allow this kind of thing. Making a system-texlive package that > actually works for everybody is not easy.
Maybe I'm completely misunderstanding the situation, but most programs indeed only need a running latex. Definitely, with system-texlive one can never assure that a random package installed on someone's computer actually works, and that the installed system has all the needed packages installed. But: - if people have their own installation, they need to know that they are on their own. - if there was texlive2007/08 pacakge available, much less people would have a need for external tex distribution The most painful situation that I remember from system-tetex was that it wanted to have some libraries (like kpathsea) installed at fixed locations. Someone should correct me, but I have a feeling that these are only needed when one wants to install packages that are part of texlive itself, like "xetex" (that should be obsolete if texlive package existed). > - A brief look at the macports texlive packages shows that even only > adapting their stuff to Fink would be a monumental task (as was making the > ports in the first place, I guess). For example, the package texlive_base > has 53(!) patch files (taken from the OpenBSD port), Wow! > among them things that > modify the basic C and C++ code of some of the applications. Making sure > that this works on 10.4 and 10.5 and on ppc and intel is a challenge. All the binaries have already been compiled on Mac for both ppc and intel (+ universal), though it's still quite a piece of work to split the packages properly. I'm still impressed by the number of patches. Basically the community is applying different patches quite happily when one asks them, though they only release texlive once every 1.5 years, so it's quite possible that people need to patch post-festum. If one would ask them to apply some patche to the core with some explanation, they would most probably do it. That would mean less patches remaining for fink itself. Mojca ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ Fink-beginners mailing list [email protected] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.beginners
