TeX (texlive) port status?

[Emmanuel Hainry]

Citando Dan Ports :
> On Thu, Sep 03, 2009 at 01:32:42PM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> > Because we want to allow MacTeX installed outside of MacPorts to  
> > satisfy the dependency. This is an exception to the usual rule,  
> > because TeX is hard to build and the MacPorts TeX ports tend to lag  
> > far behind TeX releases. And I'm told by those who use TeX that MacTeX  
> > is pretty good.
> 
>  On that note, what is the state of the MacPorts TeX ports? Are there
> major open issues? (If this question has already been beaten to death,
> apologies; I only started reading this list a couple weeks ago.
> Pointers to other threads or tickets are appreciated.)

Texlive in macports is version 2007. It is lagging behind upstream as
2008 is the current release and 2009 is in pretesting. The status of
texlive in macports is summed up in
http://trac.macports.org/ticket/16492 There has been no change since
that (apart from the fact that I have abandoned the texlive port since).

>  I'm a pretty heavy TeX user (what academic isn't?) and, all other
> things being equal, I'd prefer to stick to texlive for compatibility
> with my Linux/BSD systems that use it. I haven't run into any problems
> with the ports yet, though I only recently started using them and
> haven't done much serious tex hacking yet.

Texlive 2007 is working well. It is not the latest version, but you
probably don't need the latest version (I don't). Note that the debian
texlive package is also still 2007. The preferred (by texlive)
distribution of texlive for macosx is mactex, which is uptodate,
contains great apps and is configured to work out of the box. And which
may be recognised by macports as filling the dependency for tex...

>  I'd be happy to work on this a bit, although obviously how much would
> depend on what needs to be done and what my calendar looks like for the
> next couple months.

The texlive port is orphaned (has no maintainer) so anybody interested
in updating it can adopt it.

Emmanuel