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

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 4, 2010, at 14:28, Dan Ports wrote:

> 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.

I don't use TeX at all so I'm not sure either. Prior discussion on the matter could probably be located in the archives by searching for tex, texlive, mactex, etc., e.g.:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:lists.macosforge.org+texlive

Perhaps these would be of use:

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2008-January/004077.html

http://trac.macports.org/ticket/12913

I haven't re-read them just now but maybe they're relevant to understanding how we got to where we are now with the TeX ports.


>> 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.

I was merely suggesting something like the following could be added to the texlive (or texlive_base or ...) port:

pre-configure {
	ui_msg "If you want to use MacTeX instead of TeX Live, cancel this, install MacTeX, and add /usr/texbin to binpath in macports.conf"
}

Possibly we wouldn't even display the message unless MacTeX was already installed:

pre-configure {
	if {[file isdirectory /usr/texbin]} {
		ui_msg "If you want to use MacTeX instead of TeX Live, cancel this, and add /usr/texbin to binpath in macports.conf"
	}
}


> 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.

A tex metaport might be an even better idea. We would then need to update all TeX-using ports to use this metaport, but that's not a terribly big deal; after all, we've already had to do it once when we switched from tetex to texlive. The tex metaport could have variants for MacTeX and TeX Live and intelligently select the default variant based on whether MacTeX is already installed.

I've been hearing about teTeX's obsolescence for awhile; should it just be removed?