[68483] trunk/dports/tex/LaTeXiT/Portfile

[Dan Ports]

On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 11:00:23AM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> I was unable to locate any documentation, for example in the wiki, but I recall such discussions on the mailing lists before. A MacPorts wiki page about TeX would probably be a good thing for someone to write.

I was planning on writing a wiki page about the texlive ports. I'd be
happy to add a bit about MacTeX and TeX in general, but I don't use
MacTeX myself so I'm not sure what to add beyond what's already been
mentioned in this thread.

> In any case, it is a general problem that affects tons of ports, not just LaTeXiT. And it's probably the wrong idea to try to modify each of those ports to deal with the situation; we should deal with it at the source. Which is either in the texlive port, or one of its dependencies (texlive_base? texlive_texmf-minimal? texlive_texmf-full?). Whichever port is picked could be modified to print a message before in pre-configure, referring users to the wiki page that hasn't been written yet. And the wiki page could explain to users how to use MacTeX instead.

Definitely agree that this should be addressed in one place rather than
every single TeX port, but I'm not entirely sure what you're
suggesting. Should the texlive port check for a mactex installation and
let that satisfy its dependencies instead? Maybe by skipping
installation unless forced by a variant?

Perhaps we should have a generic "tex" metaport that could be satisfied
by any TeX distribution? We have a teTeX port that could conceivably be
used instead, although teTeX is now obsolete so anyone still using it
is probably doing something wrong.

Dan

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