On 2/7/07, Paul Fons wrote: > I am a little late it would appear to enter into the discussion on > fink's internal tex conflicting with external texs, but I thought I > would offer an idea to potentially solve the problem. First, I think > that everyone would agree that the (obsolete and discontinued) > version of teTeX included with fink is a poor choice for people who > use tex for writing.
For those who don't require much and for compiling the documentation, teTeX might still be usable, but for anyone with some reasonable demands, it's out of question. > On the other hand, teaching fink above every > version of TeX that people may use would seem to be a waste of energy > as well. > Proposal: if fink only needs a rudimentary TeX to typeset > documentation, why not 1. require a fink version of tex that is > always in the same place on all systems (e.g. binary compatibility) > and 2. hide the installation of this tex by placing it off the user's > path (e.g. place the tex binaries in a "standard" location within the > fink /sw subtree that only fink knows about? That's possible, although I cannot really imagine the amount of work needed to fix all the packages, so that they will become aware of that change. Although - when I think about it again: if one would set the necessary TeX variables and add the fink's "hidden" TeX executables to PATH only during installation of new packages (my impression was that most packages need it for compiling documentation, but I may be wrong), that should work, but on the other hand you still have people who would indeed be interested in using those binaries. So you need to have two variants then (one hidden and one visible, depending on user needs.) > I noted that it was > also suggested to change the path order, but this is a questionable > solution and would likely cause lots of problems down the road (a > debugging nightmare). As the fink tex solution is really not useful > outside of fink, why not try the solution above? I had serious problems if /sw path was at the beginning, I don't experince problems now when I installed fink's teTeX (and moved /sw at the end). In the long term it would surely make sense to integrate TeX Live. I went researching a bit, but there is one big problem: it's size, and I really have no idea how to cope with that. Unless we want to end up with 2GB zip, one should make a fink-specific zip somewhere on CTAN and adapt everything needed for it (research and remove files that are not needed, split contents into multiple packages - the most important would be to create a "minimal" tree, which would allow compiling the documentation, and a few additions, which could serve as a serious alternative to other distributions). There is still an enormous mount of work that would have to be spent for that if one would want to do it properly (and I still doubt that I could do it better than the current gwTeX, which, after all, is still being somehow-maintaned and updated). One can of course take the whole tree as well, but that wouldn't be the best idea. teTeX, gwTeX, fpTeX ... maintainers probably gave up with a good reason (too much work involved) ... Creating a (fink) package withouth the intention of maintaining it, is probably not worth the time investment, otherwise it will end up like teTeX now - unusable for any serious work. I was thinking about creating a package, but there's too much work involved and I'm not capable of maintaining it. Esp. because gwTeX still does it's best. But there's still something that I don't understand: what exacly does "support multiple external TeX distributions" mean and why is that a problem? Most packages which need TeX to compile their documentation, need only a working version "pdflatex". (I must have missed something, but I don't know what.) Which package needs more than that? (Perhaps XeTeX, but that's another story. One would not want to istall fink's XeTeX over "system-tex" anyway.) To sum my thoughts up: - I still think that system-tex makes sense until one creates a texlive package (after all, the maintainer of gwTeX has "quit" after he did a major update of the system, not before it, so the system is still usable) - texlive might be the long-term solution to go for, but it needs a bit of tweaking Mojca ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Fink-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-users
