Alexander Hansen wrote: > On Dec 30, 2008, at 12:35 AM, M. Singh wrote: > > > <snip material covered in Martin's message> > >>>> Second - is it possible to tell fink installation to use the >>>> existing >>>> MacTeX 2008 install of texlive instead of installing tetex-texmf ? >>>> Don't >>>> want to waste disk space. >>>> >>> Not currently. We found that the upstream TeX packagers liked to >>> change things around and break our placeholder packages. >> Is there any estimated time frame when this might be done ? > > There may well not be a placeholder package, ever.
Ok :( > >> The project >> can insist on users installing the full 1.15GB MacTeX 2008 package >> (which is pretty static) if you want > > We've got enough problems dealing with stuff from Apple, so making > provisions for yet another third-party vendor. Moreover, since MacTeX > insists on installing a boatload of other stuff, like ghostscript and > imagemagick, in /usr/local, that would just be inviting trouble for us. > Ok. BasicTeX then (which is a suitable static subset of MacTeX) ? To the best of my knowledge (at least as of 2-3 days ago), it does not contain the extra tools you mentioned. >> - this dependence on an >> unmaintained, large, separate piece of code, which offers users >> nothing, >> and will cause problems in a few months (as texlive diverges more and >> more from it), is a major problem. I am deploying a custom Mac >> configuration with the tools I need on an old notebook with limited >> disk >> space, and wasting space on something like this, for which I see no >> cogent reason, appears criminal to me. >> > > We'll send you a refund. ;-) > Received it. Thanks ! > But, in all seriousness, my understanding is that texlive, > historically, had set their installation up in such a way as to be > nontrivial to package in a managed setting; particularly one with as > limited of personnel resources as we have. One of our maintainers is > looking into packaging TeXLive for fink, but it hasn't been done yet. Ok. Debian/Ubuntu etc., which have far more maintainers than fink does, have done this quite successfully for over a year. I have no packaging experience of any sort, otherwise I would volunteer. > > I've been lobbying to just remove any tetex dependency from packages > that can be configured at run time for different TeX engines--I've > done this in my own packaging of LyX. > >> I do not presume to criticize the work, which is splendid in itself, >> and >> made the thought of using Mac on a notebook less daunting, but I find >> this aspect of this business a little surprising. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Fink-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-users
