Tex Live vs. print/texlive-full (was Re: texlive and package updating)

[Roland Smith]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 08:43:13AM +0200, Aymeric Mansoux wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Sat, August 10, 2013 6:03 pm, Nikola Pavlović wrote:
> > On 09/08/13 18:40, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> >> I've given up on all OS distribution-based TexLive drops.  I install
> >> texlive manually from their installer 

Same here. I generally don't update TeX more than once a year, which works
fine for me.

> >> and then run tlmgr under
> >> cron control nightly to keep it up-to-date.  I do this on
> >> FreeBSD (my primary dev and server platform) as well as all
> >> linux instances in my environment.  It makes things a lot simpler.
> >>
> >
> > How do you manage dependency tracking errors?

My solution to this problem was to maintain my own patches for ports that I
used that relied on TeX. These patches would point to the relevant binaries
without adding dependencies. I would apply these patches after running portsnap
and before running portmaster.

Luckily, TeXLive pretty much has everything TeX-related you'll ever need. And
after switching from emacs to vim, I also don't need auctex anymore. Other
ports have made TeX an optional dependency. Currently none of the ports that I
use require TeX.

> > The last time I've
> > installed it the way you do was on Slackware and since it doesn't do any
> > dependency tracking there were no problems (as long as the binaries were
> > in PATH).  I can imagine ports and pkg tools on FreeBSD complaining
> > about missing TeX packages, and AFAIK Debian based Linux distributions
> > will certainly complain (I think there is a workaround, but it involves
> > messing with dpkg).
> 
> I am also curious about this one. Any guideline or special considerations
> regarding the use of the Tex Live distribution straight into FreeBSD would
> be very helpful. Or is it just a matter of following this:
> http://www.tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html

Those instructions pretty much cover what you have to do.

I add the path to the TeXLive binaries in /etc/login.conf instead of in one of
the shell rc files. And since I like using TeX fonts, I added the directories
for e.g. the tex-gyre fonts to the GS_FONTPATH environment variable, so that
ghostscript can find them if necessary.


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