creating MacTeX links to MacPorts TeXLive

[Dan Ports]

On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 08:05:34AM +0100, Keith J. Schultz wrote:
> 	I am aware of the complexity of the problem/s. I do not know if know if
> 	tex-live can have multiple distributions on a unix based machine. (Yes, the Mac
> 	is Unix under the hood, but ?! You know what I mean).

It's not so much a question of whether it's possible as whether it's
worth doing. I haven't seen a compelling argument for it -- if anything
the increased complexity argues in favor of not doing so -- so I have
little inclination to do the work to make this possible.

> 	Yes, Ports SHOULD be updated via MacPorts. Yet, I have check my MacTeX distribution
> 	and the binaries do not have seemed to have be changed!! Yet, using the TeX Live Utility
> 	(GUI to tlmgr) I have notice that scripts and packages are updated daily!!!
> 	In effect this means that users are stuck with a Tex-Live distribution that is FROZEN in time
> 	as far as PACKAGES are concerned. There is quite alot of development going on in the unicode
> 	support in TeX, especially Xe(La)TeX, Lua, Context, etc. I would think tlmgr support of the utmost
> 	importance. 
> 	Probably, there could be support for tlmgr, once support is there for the TeX Distribution Preference Pane.
> 	There seems to already some support for MacPorts in it. 

I see no way to integrate tlmgr into a MacPorts installation of texlive.
As Ryan says, having another package manager involved is antithetical
to MacPorts' goal of helping you manage your software. Note that the
same is true of other packaging systems (e.g. Linux distributions) that
install texlive.

That said, we don't have to be limited to a static snapshot of the TeX
packages from the yearly release. I've tried to arrange things so that
we have the flexibility to update the ports with the latest version
between releases.

So far, we've never done so, mainly because the current texlive ports
haven't been around long enough to give us an opportunity. I don't have
a great sense of when we'd want to do that, if at all: periodically?
after important updates? on request? Opinions are welcome!

Dan

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