TeXLive

[Hiroki Sato]

Romain Tartière <romain at freebsd.org> wrote
  in <20111011101902.GB14910 at blogreen.org>:

ro> Hello!
ro> 
ro> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 07:23:48AM -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
ro> > On 10/10/2011 06:44 AM, Eitan Adler wrote:
ro> > > Are there any plans on getting these committed to the mainline ports
ro> > > tree? I'd be willing to work with you on that.
ro> > 
ro> > I agree with Eitan.
ro> 
ro> I would also be pleased to see TeXLive in the FreeBSD ports (obviously).
ro> There are a few issues to sort out before however:
ro>   - The way TeXLive sources are distributed is not convenient: all
ro>     binaries are built and installed from a single sources tarball.
ro>     This leads to the "big" print/texlive-core but really lacks
ro>     scalability.  Back in 2008, Hiroki Sato was working on splitting all
ro>     this AFAICR.  Hiroki, I added you in Cc, can you please tell us if
ro>     you had any progress on this topic?

 I feel guilty about this because although I had/have several
 prototypes and plans to integrate TeXLive into the ports tree, it
 have not actually happened so far.  There were two obstacles in the
 work.  One was there were technical issues (compatibility-related)
 that prevented some existing TeX-related software we had in the ports
 tree from working.  This was in around 2007 but solved now.  Another
 one was how many ports we should have for TeX-related software.
 After testing several prototypes including a single port version, a
 set of ~2000 ports (one port for one macro), ~150 ports, or ~30
 ports, I think it seems good for us to have one of basic utilities,
 one for basic (stripped-down) macro sets as something like
 texlive-core + texlive-texmf, and the others for optional macro
 packages.  The basic idea is the same among them regardless of the
 total number of ports.  In practical, 100 would be the maximum
 number.

 So, primary issues described above were basically solved.  Although
 there are still trivial issues such as handling of a large distfile,
 it is not difficult to solve.  However, how to handle updating a
 macro package in the basic port is a problem to me and time passed
 when I was thinking about that.  More specifically, currently we have
 many latex-* and tex-* ports to install new macro packages or
 override the default ones.  It becomes complex over time.  Committing
 a single large TeXLive port is easy, but I do not want to create the
 same situation again in the new world and want consistency for
 updating a macro package in the distribution.  So, I wanted some
 compatibility with TeXLive's package management utility (tlmgr).
 Unfortunately it was too premature when I first looked into it
 (around 2007, IIRC).  The current version is much better than before,
 but I still need some investigation about that.  If we have or use
 reliable package catalogs of CTAN including file lists of each macro
 package via tlmgr or something, we can take an approach like BSDPAN,
 I think.

 A version based on TeXLive 2011 with a small number of ports can be
 committed if we ignore the last concern and clean up the current
 teTeX-related ports.  Any comments about that?

 I am very sorry for being unresponsive to many people who contacted
 me about that...

-- Hiroki
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20111022/f85c163f/attachment.pgp