Installing asymptote

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 29, 2012, at 12:25, Murray Eisenberg wrote:

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

For most ports that depend on a TeX port, the dependencies are written in bin: style instead of port: style specifically so that you could edit macports.conf and add MacTeX's path to your binpath setting to avoid having MacPorts install those ports. This exception to the usual "MacPorts dependencies only" rule is for TeX software only.

The asymptote port, however, does not have its TeX dependency written in bin: style so this trick won't work. I don't know if that 
was a deliberate decision by the asymptote port maintainer or an oversight.