X windows and applications advice

Mojca Miklavec mojca.miklavec.lists at gmail.com
Wed May 21 23:43:08 PDT 2014


On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 2:52 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On May 21, 2014, at 05:47, James Griffin wrote:
>
>> The macports install is pulling in texlive but I've already got mactex installed so not sure why it needs to do that. I suppose I could just stick with the macports texlive instead of the tug.org package.
>
> Usually MacPorts wants to use its own dependencies, instead of non-MacPorts versions of things you may already have installed. MacTeX is an exception to this rule. So there are two possibilities:
>
> 1. One of the ports you're trying to install needs TeX, cannot use MacTex, and therefore the dependency is declared to enforce MacPorts TeX Live (as a port: style dependency)
>
> 2. One of the ports you're trying to install needs TeX, could use MacTeX, but the dependency is declared incorrectly to require MacPorts TeX Live; in this case, the dependency should be changed (from a port: style dependency to a bin: style dependency)

What is the correct dependency specification?

> Can you figure out which port is pulling in MacPorts TeX Live? I guess it's one of these; these are the ones that require MacPorts TeX Live and do not allow MacTeX, though I don't know if that's deliberate in every case or an oversight.

In all texlive-* ports it must be deliberate which brings us to a much
shorter list:

> $ port echo depends:port:texlive
> dblatex
> dvipng
> dvisvgm
> evince
> lcdf-typetools
> lhs2tex
> lilypond
> lilypond-devel
> asymptote
> xindy
> auto-multiple-choice
> auto-multiple-choice-devel
> cadabra
> dot2texi
> imaxima
> stog

I wasn't aware that it was allowed to depend on an external TeX
distribution (Fink had a pseudo-port for that).

In asymptote it's mostly an oversight, however:

- it installs a small number of files to TEXMF: kpathsea from MacTeX
won't be able to find those files unless the files are installed by
macports to /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local or unless the user changes
configuration to include the tree installed from macports (which is
relatively easy, but not obvious to a new user)

- asymptote is part of MacTeX already, so one could argue that MacTeX
users don't really need to install another copy of asymptote (except
that users might want a newer version that what's in TL, that some
features are disabled in MacTeX to reduce dependencies on external
libraries, and that xasy from MacTeX calls system python which might
not work due to missing packages)

Other tools like xindy, dvipng, dvisvgm, ... are also part of MacTeX.

Mojca


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