Migration TeX/LaTeX: from teTeX --> TeXlive

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 15 Sep 2013 21:00:22 +0200, Roland Smith wrote:
> Personally I don't think TeX is a good fit for the ports tree (because of
> duplication of effort).

In conclusion, that could be said about many other software
that brings its own package management. Of course, LaTeX is
a big and complex beast that TeXLive manages well (instead
of the system-provided tools for managing the ports tree).
In my opinion, a good _integration with_ the ports tree is
important, so dependencies will be resolved properly (and
you won't end up havong both TeXLive _and_ teTeX on your
system for no particular need). On the other hand, this
might introduce demands of other "software compilations"
to move their management out of the system's range, so we
end up micro-managing many different sets of software in
their own specific way, abandoning the centralized means
of maintaining our software...



> I installed TeXLive using its own installer long
> before it was present in the ports tree.

It should maybe be possible (and encouraged?) to use a
concept like "using the ports tree for invoking the TeXLive
custom installer", so you don't have to manually download
and extract stuff, a simple "make install" from the ports
tree would do that for you. However, the TeXLive installer
co-operates well with FreeBSD, so it's not a big problem to
get TeXLive installed and running.



> Since TeXLive is very complete and
> self-contained, I don't have other ports that depend on TeX.

It's the port maintainers' task to take care of the proper
declaration of dependencies, and for system tools to handle
them. I don't think it is a big problem to make this consistent
with how TeXLive handles things.



> I am certain that
> TeXLive has pre-built binaries for FreeBSD 9, but I don't know about CURRENT.

It would be even more greaterer to have "pkg add texlive" working,
performing the download, and installing the FreeBSD binaries and
libraries as needed, while keeping the system records intact. :-)



> To see which ports require (parts of) teTeX, use `pkg_info -Rx tetex`

Plus `pkg_info -Rx teTeX` because of the way it is spelled. :-)



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...