TexLive 2009 plans to newer version

[Dan Ports]

[sorry for the slow response -- was out of town and away from email for
 a few days]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 09:11:53AM +0100, Emmanuel Hainry wrote:
> This proposal is perfectly reasonable. I am not totally convinced by
> debian's approach: it can be difficult to understand what to install to
> make a specific document compile (installing texlive-context to have
> metapost is (was) strange). It is far better than a port for each ctan
> package (nice granularity but I don't want to spend my whole life
> installing new ports when I want to use a specific symbol, draw a
> diagram...). I liked the full/minimal approach (I did not create it,
> just followed happily Edd Barrett's openBSD port) which made things
> simple both for the user and for the maintainer.

I'm not completely satisfied with it either, but the reason I'm a fan of
the collections-based approach is that I use a few packages obscure
enough that they won't be found in a minimal dist. (Not too surprising
-- we wouldn't expect one package to be right for everyone). But at the
same time, I'd rather not install the increasingly large full
distribution on my laptop. This gives me some form of middle ground. If
nothing else, I can at least avoid installing several hundred MB of
fonts for languages I can't read.

Certainly there should still be a metaport or two that pull in a
reasonable collection of packages, and one for a full install. TL's
"schemes" might be a good starting point, but I haven't looked too hard
at them.

Dan

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