TexLive on FreeBSD 8.1

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 12:08:12PM +0200, Michel Talon wrote:
> Anh Ky Huynh wrote:
> > Antonio Olivares <olivares14031 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Sorry to ask about this since this has been beaten to death many
> > > times, but I *wonder* why FreeBSD does not have TeXLive as default
> > > tex installation?
> > 
> > As TeXLive 2009 doesn't have binaries for FreeBSD ;) You can try TeXLive
> > 2008 instead.
> 
> Maybe the problem is that TexLive is a monster (already teTex is a
> monster) 

What other alternatives are there? teTeX is no longer being maintained.

> that many long time TeX users don't want on their hard disk.

Personally, as a long-time TeX user, I don't mind. On the contrary, I like it
that a lot of packages are included and preconfigured in TeXLive.

> Having TeXLive as a port would be nice, having it as the default TeX
> seems to me stupid. It means that installing any port which has a
> dependency on TeX would install this several hundred mega bytes monster
> for any one, even those who don't intend to use TeX in any way. 

About half of the ports that depend on TeX are actually tools that use
TeX. For most of the others it is optional, usually for building
documentation. (Run 'find /usr/ports/ -type f -name Makefile -exec grep -Hi
tetex {} \; | less' and see for yourself.) I would agree that most project
would do better just to provide ready-built docs in PDF, HTML or text format
rather than depend on TeX.

> Even
> most TeX users have no use for LuaTex and other niceties of TexLive.

Then don't install them. The TeXLive installer is quite flexible. As for
LuaTeX, that will become the default TeX engine over time, like pdfTeX is now.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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