TeX Live: texlive +medium vs. BasicTex

[Art McGee]

Not sure if this is an approriate question for this list or -users,
but does anyone know how the texlive metaport with the default +medium
variant compares to the BasicTex package, which is a subset of the
full Tex Live:

http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

"BasicTeX is a subset of TeX Live designed for easy download by users
with limited download speed. The package is remarkably capable. It
contains all of the standard tools needed to write TeX documents,
including TeX, LaTeX, pdfTeX, MetaFont, dvips, ConTeXt, MetaPost, and
XeTeX. It contains AMSTeX, the Latin Modern Fonts, the TeX Live
Manager to add and update packages from TeX Live, and the new
SyncTeX."


Art