TeXLive merge into FreeBSD ports tree - FreeBSD project idea

David Naylor naylor.b.david at gmail.com
Mon Jun 18 13:21:51 UTC 2012


Hi all,

Summary of below.  I have started an effort to get TeXLive into the FreeBSD 
ports. See github.com/DragonSA/texlive for details.  Volunteers welcome.  

On Sunday, 17 June 2012 22:04:15 David Schultz wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2012, Jan Henrik Sylvester wrote:
> > Even with a knob instead of checking if print/texlive-core is installed,
> > it would put a lot of mess into the ports tree. Some maintainers will
> > not agree to introduce these conditions, if there is no general
> > agreement that we want to transition to TeXLive that way.

teTeX hasn't been updated since 2006 and the maintainer of teTeX has 
discontinued development and recommends using TeXLive.  Undoubtably updating 
the TeXLive will break some things but the same could be said about teTeX if 
an update existed.  

Are there any people who don't want to migrate to TeXLive?

> > As far as I remember, both romain@ and hrs@ have stated that they do not
> > want both teTeX and TeXLive in the tree concurrently.

Looking through the list of bundled packages for TeXLive it will be quite 
difficult to have both TeXLive and teTeX in the tree concurrently.  There are 
a group of "support" ports, such as xdvik and ptex that require special 
integration into either teTeX or TeXLive.  To switch between either will 
require reinstalling many dependencies, not just the TeXLive or teTeX ports.  

With that said, it is not impossible nor, I think, will it impose a big 
maintenance burden.  
 
> In that case, it sounds like using TeXLive in FreeBSD will be a
> bit tricky until someone steps in and does all the work required
> for integration.  Unfortunately I'm a bit time-constrained for the
> next few months, but I do use TeXLive and would be happy to test
> any proposed patches.

I have started working on just this, getting TeXLive into FreeBSD ports.  It 
is still early days and I have only two monolithic ports, with texlive-base 
requiring lots of love.  

I believe my work is in a state ready for initial testing (verifying the 
ports) and some feedback.  Some open questions are:
 - how to split texlive-texmf (OpenBSD has an approach)
 - how to handle bundled software that has existing (sometimes outdated) ports

Also, I am looking for a sponsor: someone who will commit the ports when they 
are ready, and to provide feedback so that the ports may get to a ready state.  

For details about the project, and to get the ports, please see: 
github.com/DragonSA/texlive

Regards

P.S. I am not subscribed to freebsd-ports@ so please CC me.  
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