TexLive 2009 plans Re: [MacPorts] #16492: UPDATE: TexLive 2007 to newer version

[Dan Ports]

I posted the following comments about the work I'm doing on updating
the texlive ports to v2009 in a ticket, but since they are some
fairly large changes, I thought I'd send them to -dev too. (Apologies
for the spam to anyone who already received it.)

Any comments are appreciated.

Dan

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 10:49:25PM -0000, MacPorts wrote:
> #16492: UPDATE: TexLive 2007 to newer version
> ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
>  Reporter:  luis.beca@???          |       Owner:  milosh@???           
>      Type:  update               |      Status:  new                
>  Priority:  Normal               |   Milestone:                     
> Component:  ports                |     Version:                     
>  Keywords:                       |        Port:  texlive            
> ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------
> 
> Comment(by dports@???):
> 
>  Let me say a few words about what I'm working on with the texlive port so
>  that people know what's going on -- looks like there's been a lot of
>  interest in a more recent TeXLive lately.
> 
>  For background, texlive is a large and lumbering monstrosity. It includes
>  a giant pile of source code (complete with all of its dependent
>  libraries), an even more giant pile of TeX packages, and its own package
>  manager. I believe texlive 2009 is divided into over 3000 packages, which
>  are grouped into about 80 "collections", and further grouped into 10
>  "schemes".
> 
>  The version currently in MacPorts is 2007, which IIRC predates TexLive's
>  package management system. So there's a texlive_base port that installs
>  the binaries, a texlive_texmf-full and a texlive_texmf-minimal that
>  install some or all of the tex files, s texlive_texmf-docs port, and a
>  texlive metaport.
> 
>  This organization doesn't really work for TL 2009, because there's no
>  "minimal" texmf tree anymore and it's not really clear exactly what we'd
>  want to put in a "minimal" install anyway. And I would really rather not
>  support only a full install of texlive, because that's about a gig of
>  distfiles and probably over 2GB installed. Instead, I'd like to provide
>  finer granularity so that users can choose what they want installed.
> 
>  So my plan is to create the following ports:
>   * texlive-common, which contains support scripts and files required for
>  building and installing the others (e.g. texmf.cnf)
>   * texlive-bin, which contains everything built from source (not too
>  different from today's texlive_base)
>   * one port per texlive collection, e.g. texlive-basic, texlive-latex-
>  recommended, texlive-lang-african
> 
>  I'm leaning toward one port per collection because I think this is the
>  only option with a decent granularity and a reasonable number of ports. It
>  would wind up creating 80-90 ports, which is a lot, but not totally
>  unreasonable to me. (Note that 30 of these are language-specific packages
>  for 30 languages, and another 24 are documentation in different
>  languages.) This is basically the approach that Debian takes.
> 
>  The other alternatives are one port per package, which would be great in
>  that you could install exactly the packages you need, but require 3000+
>  ports, which would be a nightmare. One port per scheme (there are 10 of
>  them) would also be a decent option, except that the schemes overlap, so
>  the ports would conflict. I think one port per collection is the way to
>  go.
> 
>  I've done a lot of the work necessary for this, including getting the
>  binaries to build and the giant distfile carved up into more manageable
>  collections. I can provide more details if anyone is interested, and I
>  hope to have a patch soon once I get it into reasonably usable shape.
> 
>  This has been even more of a painful mess than I expected it to be!
> 
> -- 
> Ticket URL: <http://trac.macports.org/ticket/16492#comment:47>
> MacPorts <http://www.macports.org/>
> Ports system for Mac OS
> 

-- 
Dan R. K. Ports              MIT CSAIL                http://drkp.net/