Installing asymptote

[Jeremy Lavergne]

> Question: Can I install the asymptote port without having the automatic installation of its dependency texlive?

You will have to manually edit the asymptote portfile to have it find your non-macports TeX installation:
sudo port edit asymptote

This will entail removing or changing the dependency so it is satisfied with what you have (see the depends_lib line, "port:texlive"). Then you need to update the path to TeX we give asymptote (see the configure.args lines, "--with-latex=${prefix}/share/texmf-local/tex/latex").

Note that after doing a selfupdate (or sync) the changes will be undone. If you want to make it permanent you should consider making a local portfile tree for asymptote. This is discussed and setup in ${prefix}/etc/macports/sources.conf

> I already have the complete texlive installed directly, without MacPorts, using the MacTeX distribution. I want to keep the latter, and I certainly don't want to have yet another texlive installation.
> 
> Can this be done by some edit in the asymptote Portfile to eliminate mention of that dependency?
> 
> After the edit, when I run "sudo port install asymptote", will my pre-existing installation of texlive be found? (Note that the texlive files are in the usual locations.)

Should. Feel free to post your edits somewhere so they can be reviewed and given a second "should" stamp :-)

> Reason for question: Given that I already had texlive installed (but not through MacPorts), I tried installing the asymptote binary obtained directly from http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/. But when I run the xasy command, I get a pop-up saying that the PIL (Python Imaging Library) Imaging-1.1.7 is required. And trying to install PIL leads to a further chain of dependencies which seems like more trouble than should be necessary.

At that point, I'd just let MacPorts do everything, switching out which TeX you're using. But as noted above, you can convince MacPorts you have TeX and tell asymptote where to find it.

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