texlive-basic update broken

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2011 at 11:06, Keith J. Schultz <keithjschultz at web.de> wrote:
> Hi Dan,
>
> All I was trying to point out is that what ever source macports is distributing
> that they are not using the the final realease

You are wrong. MacPorts is using the final release. The same one as
MacTeX is using (except that MacTeX can update packages and break
things since TL has been tested at least to some extent, while
day-to-day updates are not).

> As I suggested switch to the MacTex Distribution.
...
> If you can not wait do not complain, switch to MacTeX. Like I said those porting
> are volunteers and try to do their best. Yet, they need TIME.

Are you asking the maintainer of texlive port for MacPorts to abandon
development of the port and switch to MacTeX, leaving tetex in
MacPorts instead??????



Please keep the following in mind:

- MacPorts has never in history been so fast in porting the latest
version of TeX Live. Compare that with Debian or Ubuntu which still
ships TeX Live 2009. Please give me a list of Linux distributions that
already ship TL 2011.

- MacTeX doesn't work on Tiger. If MacPorts still works on Tiger and
Panther (I think it does), so do its TeX Live packages in contrast to
MacTeX. MacPorts even ship a 64-bit version of XeTeX.

- You can claim that any program XYZ is easier to use if one simply
downloads dmg instead of installing it via MacPorts. This list is not
meant for discussion whether Octave.app is better than octave port in
MacPorts and that octave port should be removed since it is useless.
It is about making ports in MacPorts better. I still installed Qt from
Nokia's page, but this is not to say that qt port in MacPorts is
useless (even if broken at the moment).

- Not every user cares what version of TeX he or she uses. Those are
free to use MacPorts's TeX. 99% of TeX users don't care about updates.
They just want to compile their 10-years-old articles.

- TeX Live updates from upstream repositories with
the-latest-and-the-greatest package versions can easily break your TeX
documents. Not everyone wants to live on bleeding edge.

Mojca