Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2012 14:02:02 +0200 From: Jan Henrik Sylvester <me@janh.de> To: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: hackers-list freebsd <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: TeXLive merge into FreeBSD ports tree - FreeBSD project idea Message-ID: <4FDDC73A.3090203@janh.de> In-Reply-To: <20120617060135.GA7986@zim.MIT.EDU> References: <CACsYpVMrR1aDDM5k9t8c%2BLRdnEL5yR761L7D6er0gM=1F9i4ww@mail.gmail.com> <20120530204502.5cab974c@desktop.pc> <20120617060135.GA7986@zim.MIT.EDU>
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On 06/17/2012 08:01, David Schultz wrote: > On Wed, May 30, 2012, Aldis Berjoza wrote: >> I which TeXLive would be merged in FreeBSD ports. Romain is doing great >> job maintaining it. And it work, And it work now. In fact it works for >> more than a year. > > I have used his TeXLive ports through portshaker for a while. > They work pretty well, but there are some issues due to the fact > that the TeXLive folks have some strange ideas. For one, TeXLive > is split into over 2000 packages, many of which are tiny; the > FreeBSD package system doesn't handle that very well. For another, > TeXLive now has its own (dubious) package manager, tlmgr, which > doesn't play well with other package management systems. > > I'm not a ports committer, but perhaps a good first step to > getting TeXLive working better in FreeBSD is to introduce a > TeTeX vs TeXLive knob in the ports tree so that people don't > wind up accidentally clobber their TeXLive install when TeTex > gets pulled in as a dependency. I have been using Romain's TeXLive for almost a year, too. It is great, Romain does a good job and is very helpful, but it is definitely not ready for ports, yet. On machines not older than two years, the 500 to 600 ports that texlive-scheme-tetex is bearable, although it considerably slows down testing if all ports are up to date etc. Though it would like to have texlive-scheme-full, I have stopped using it for that reason. On older machines, even texlive-scheme-tetex adds a lot to port upgrading operations. The last time I checked, there still have been many broken links installed into bin. It is pretty easy to fix after installing the ports, but of course it should be done in the port, which at least does not seem to be trivial. Some other ports do not build because of this, for example with epstopdf missing. Quite a few conflicts and changes in dependencies are needed for TeXLive. TeXLive does not just replace teTeX, but also ports like freetype-tools, t1utils, jadetex, etc. I have patches for all ports I use, which has been working for me for half a year. If TeXLive and teTeX were supposed to exist in ports in parallel for some time, something like bsd.tex.mk would be needed with a generic way to specify tex related dependencies. Maybe this would be useful for the transition period, since we probably would not want texlive-scheme-tetex to replace all teTeX dependencies, but many people disagree that having both TeX at the same time in ports would be a good idea. There are ports that I could not get to build with TeXLive at all: misc/freebsd-doc-* There are too many error messages I do not understand. Someone with a lot more insight will have to look at these, before TeXLive can replace teTeX in ports. I have posted to texlive-freebsd@googlegroups.com about this, but there were no answers. I guess the biggest problem for people to put more effort into fixing TeXLive in FreeBSD ports is the huge disagreement about how a final solution should look like. OT: FreeBSD might be more behind than others, but others have trouble with TeXLive in their native packaging system, too: Nothing never than TeXLive 2009 made it into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Cheers, Jan Henrik
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