creating MacTeX links to MacPorts TeXLive

[Dan Ports]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2010 at 09:39:58AM +0100, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> 	I have a few points question:
> 		1) The tex-live 2009 port shoud not be upgraded when installing tex-live 2010
> 			a) they are so to say two different aninmals
> 			b) Tex-live distributions 2009 and 2010 can co-exist

Although it is possible to have two different versions of TeX Live
installed, it would require some work to keep them separate, and we
haven't done that with the texlive ports.

It would also require us to have (and maintain!) two separate versions
of each of the texlive ports, e.g. texlive-latex-2009 and
texlive-latex-2010 -- bearing in mind that there are close to 90
separate texlive ports already. This, I think, would cause a lot of
confusion for texlive users and maintainers of ports that depend on
texlive components.

Generally speaking, MacPorts tries to avoid having multiple versions of
ports unless there's a really compelling reason to have more than one.
I think in general texlive users do just want to have the latest stable
version installed, and automatically upgrade when a new one is
available. I wasn't aware of anyone wanting to keep old versions of
texlive insatlled -- if you do, I'd be interested to know why.

> 		2) Updating of the Tex-Live distribution is done via tlmgr (TexLive manager)
> 			Is it supported or will it work with the MacPorts version?

No -- if texlive is installed through MacPorts, it needs to be updated
via MacPorts. We don't support (and don't install) tlmgr because having
another package manager in use can cause problems as they will  interfere
with each other.

> 		3) Is the Tex Distribution Preference Pane supported?
> 		        a) refers partly to 1b

Not yet, but thanks to Faisal Moledina's work it should soon be
possible to select MacPorts TeXLive from the MacTeX TeX Distribution
prefpane. See http://trac.macports.org/ticket/26784


> 		4) Where do the MacTextras go? Into the MacPorts Directory(Folder) in Applications?

They aren't included in the texlive ports because they're not actually
parts of texlive (hence the "extras" name), and we don't have a
specific port for them, but I think we do have ports for most of the
software included in there.

> 		5) There is the BasicTex distribution for TeXLive. Maybe that is what you are looking for
> 		     to divide TeX up.

Not really -- we already have most of texlive divided into separate
ports such that you can install whatever combination of collections you
want. It looks like BasicTeX would be the combination of
texlive-{basic,latex,latex-recommended,context,metapost,pstricks,xetex}
which is actually not that far off from our default texlive installation
(texlive +medium). 

The only problem we have is that we have to build all the binaries at
once in texlive-bin, whether they're used or not. That's because of how
the source is distributed and built. BasicTeX is a binary distribution
so it doesn't look like it would be much help.

Dan

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