Max Horn wrote: []
So I think it would be good to at least have a FAQ entry that explains the reasons for this (legal issues), and how to work around it (installing the missing package(s) from source).
There is one aspect of this situation that I haven't seen addressed yet:
Fink needs to make an effort to keep the package description for the *precise* version of the bindist around. Otherwise the workaround does not work. Trying to use the bindist can then quickly turn into a nightmare.
Let me give an example: Following the complaints of a new user who had a hard time installing texmacs from scratch with Fink (the user actually was the author of TeXmacs himself), I tried to do this myself. It was not a pleasant experience, and if I had been a genuine newbie, I am not sure if I wouldn't have stopped my friendship with Fink right there.
What I tried was to install Fink from the binary installer and then texmacs from the bindist. This turned out to be impossible.
The problem in this case is tetex-texmf whose bindist version is classified restrictive and therefore does not exist as precompiled binary. Unfortunately, the version from the bindist (1.0.2-6) cannot be built from source, because the source URL points to empty space. In the stable tree, it has been replaced by version 2.0.1-2.
Therefore I had to selfupdate-cvs, which in turn replaced quite a lot of other package descriptions by versions that are not in the bindist. Almost all the debs that had been downloaded before the problem with tetex-texmf showed up were discarded, and practically everything had to be built from source (It did download a lot of debs before seeing the problem with tetex-texmf, because at the beginning when the list of packages to download was built, it said without asking that it would install system-tetex; that this would not work was detected only later in the procedure). In the end, to get any result at all, I had to switch on the unstable tree and do compilations for about 5 hours. This does not even count xfree86 which was taken care of by system-xfree86, and I don't tell all the little problems that showed up on the way.
The author of TeXmacs had less problems than me, because on the machine where he tried this procedure, Gerben Wierda's tetex was installed, so he could use the system-tetex package and managed to use the bindist for texmacs, after all. He was not too happy, though, because he tried to follow the instructions from the Fink web page and had all the usual problems with this, like ~/.cshrc not taken into account because of existing ~/.tcshrc. On the Fink download page, this is still not fixed.
Then there is dselect which is still recommended on the download page. I think no innocent newbie should be asked to use dselect, the shock might be too strong. Actually I wonder how many potential Fink users give up at this point to be never seen again. Mentioning FinkCommander here would be better.
We made a web page http://www.texmacs.org/Download/Fink.html with instructions to install TeXmacs via Fink, but right now the part about installing from the bindist only works if tetex is installed from outside of Fink.
-- Martin
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