TeXLive merge into FreeBSD ports tree - FreeBSD project idea

[David Schultz]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012, Jan Henrik Sylvester wrote:
> Quite a few conflicts and changes in dependencies are needed for 
> TeXLive. TeXLive does not just replace teTeX, but also ports like 
> freetype-tools, t1utils, jadetex, etc. I have patches for all ports I 
> use, which has been working for me for half a year. If TeXLive and teTeX 
> were supposed to exist in ports in parallel for some time, something 
> like bsd.tex.mk would be needed with a generic way to specify tex 
> related dependencies. Maybe this would be useful for the transition 
> period, since we probably would not want texlive-scheme-tetex to replace 
> all teTeX dependencies, but many people disagree that having both TeX at 
> the same time in ports would be a good idea.

Right, so like I said, having the knob in the tree would be a
useful first step, even if TeXLive isn't ready for inclusion.
(I'd be surprised if there's a good reason to have multiple
versions of things like t1utils, but that's a separate issue.)

> I guess the biggest problem for people to put more effort into fixing 
> TeXLive in FreeBSD ports is the huge disagreement about how a final 
> solution should look like.
> 
> OT: FreeBSD might be more behind than others, but others have trouble 
> with TeXLive in their native packaging system, too: Nothing never than 
> TeXLive 2009 made it into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Yep, it's a giant mess.  IIRC Ubuntu ships the most popular
TeXLive schemas as separate packages.  Doing anything more
fine-grained than that seems unmanageable, especially since
dependencies among TeXLive packages aren't tracked properly.