What is the best way to access binaries outside of the standard MacPort path

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Joël,

On 21 November 2017 at 13:41, Joël Brogniart wrote:
>
> I updated the patch at <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/55106> and asked for a review twice in the developer list. As english is not my main language, I'm not sure if I've done something incorrectly or if everyone is too busy to check.

Everyone too busy to check.

However,
    "Could someone review ticket #55106"
is a totally boring subject that I usually tend to skip. Next time it
might be better to use a subject like
    "Review of patch for dblatex to support an external TeX installation"
Make sure to include the link to the ticket (which you did, but many
users write just the number which requires more effort from people
interested in spending 5 seconds to check if this is something they
could do quickly).

When people are busy and see a subject they are not interested in,
they might just skip it or trash it. If you want a review, putting the
ticket number is helpful, but it's more helpful if you also tell them
the area which needs attention. It will more likely attract developers
with general interest in TeX.

> Could you tell me if I should only be patient, add more information or just abort that patch tentative because it is undesirable?

More information won't necessarily help and giving up will help even less :)

What you could try is:
- do some pings on the IRC channel
- perhaps try to resubmit the patch as a PR on GitHub

In theory none of that would be needed, but we are somewhat
under-staffed and in reality the patches on GitHub tend to get
slightly more visibility. (Our official policy is not to duplicate
patches, but I would only strongly stick to this rule when it comes to
avoiding opening new ticket for existing PRs. Creating a PR from
existing ticket should still be acceptable in my opinion.)


My own feedback: what you added to the port should be part of one of
the PortGroups in case it's not already. I totally agree that this
would be nice to fix for dblatex, but I totally hate the idea of each
and every port having to do so ugly tricks. I didn't check in details,
but I strongly suspect that at least part of the functionality might
have been implemented in the texlive PortGroup already, I didn't take
the time to check how much though.


On 13 October 2017 at 10:56, Joël Brogniart via macports-dev wrote:
> I maintain two local ports for tools that use Latex (dblatex and auto-multiple-choice).

I'm confused: Why are you not listed as a co-maintainer?

> These tools could either use Latex from MacPorts' TexLive or another Latex installation so they have a variant for a non Macports Latex.