TeX (texlive) port status?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 6, 2009, at 09:56, Andrea D'Amore wrote:

> On 04/set/09, at 11:04, Emmanuel Hainry wrote:
>
>> Note that the debian texlive package is also still 2007.
>
> iirc this is due to TeXLive 2008 having its own file manager, tlmgr,  
> and that could conflict with Debian packaging system.
> How do Macports cope with ports that have their own packaging  
> system, i.e. octave or luarocks (that I ported) for instance? Is  
> there an official guideline?

MacPorts is The Package Manager.

Consider CPAN, the system for installing Perl modules. We do not want  
users to use CPAN with MacPorts; instead, we want the user to install  
a p5-something port representing the module they want. We repackage  
the Perl modules as ports. The same would apply to anything provided  
by tlmgr or any other similar system (Ruby gems, PHP PEAR or PECL  
modules, etc.).


>> 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'm interested in this, do you mean by using file dependencies  
> rather than port dependencies in single portfiles that depend on  
> texlive or is there a general way to make Macports aware of an  
> installed TeX distribution?
> I found myself having very small typesetting needs thus I ended  
> using BasicTeX that, as far as I understand, is from MacTeX core  
> too. I'd like to use binaries I already have rather than building  
> texlive that is kind of a big port.

Thus far the suggestion has been to modify every single port that  
depends on texlive, to ensure the dependency is written  
"bin:something:texlive", so that if some other software installed by  
the user in a place identified by binpath provides that something,  
then the texlive port will not be installed.

An alternate solution could be to write a tex meta-port that would do  
this. Then we would update every single port that depends on texlive  
to depend on that metaport instead.