Hello Mojca!
> Warmly welcome to another addictive distraction (aka. MacPorts :), So true... > it's nice to see you here as well. Thanks – it's time to meet again sometimes in the nearer future :-) >> Ports that are ok with using MacTeX instead will have declared >> their dependencies in such a way (using the bin: specification >> instead of the port: specification) that MacTeX versions will >> satisfy them. >> >> If you have MacPorts set up in this way, and you install a port, >> and it still pulls in MacPorts texlive ports, then either those >> ports' dependencies need to be fixed to use bin: instead of port:, >> or there is a specific reason why those ports can't do it that way. > > I wanted to reply something similar (but wouldn't be able to express > myself as nicely as Ryan did). Yeah, this sounds very promising! > TeX Live is a bit special in the sense that it's a 5 GB(?) monster More than 6GByte meanwhile... > with only a bunch of command-line utilities (as opposed to providing > libraries to link against, which would be prohibitive to make this > kind of an exception) and advanced users would usually want their > own special setup, or perhaps super up-to-date packages. Exactly. This year it is probably even more important than usual to have access to an up-to-date repository since the LaTeX team decided to make UTF-8 encoding the default in LaTeX, which causes quite a number of packages to fail, and these failures are only detected now. Additionally, packages for xetex and luatex are in most cases under constant development. > Before going into further detail I would like to point out that in > the beginning I kind of tried to fight the same battle as you do now > and tried to avoid installing TeX Live from MacPorts at all > costs. Hehe :-) > We sometimes get requests for supporting installation of tlmgr only. > This is something that's a lot more tricky in my eyes than just > letting the user install TL himself and allowing some ports to > forgive the dependency on texlive when that package is not > present. (Code to prove us wrong is of course always welcome :) I fully agree. > 1.) Some ports like "dblatex" introduce a "+mactex" variant [...] Yes. > 2.) As Ryan already mentioned, one can specify a dependency in > "bin:<specification>" form specification, so that either a local > TeX installation or a port installed by the texlive port will > satisfy the dependency. If the specified binary doesn't exist, > MacPorts will install the specified port. If it does exist, it > won't install anything in additional. See ftgl as an example of > such a port. Yes. Looks very promising. > The disadvantage is that it's nearly impossible to guarantee that > the build will be successful in the case of a local TeX > installation. I can live with that, since it is an external dependency. IMHO, it's the job of the package's `configure' script to test that. > [...] For all those reasons I never bothered enabling external TL > dependencies for asymptote and I'm still not sure if it is worth it. Fortunately, the packages I'm interested in don't pose such problems. > So in short: it definitely is possible to avoid installing any > texlive-related packages from MacPorts. The question is whether you > care enough about this functionality to be willing to go into some > extra troubles, and in any case there are probably a lot of ports > that might need a patch to work as desired. Yeah, will try to work on that. Werner