Re: TexLive

[brook%biology.nmsu.edu@localhost (Brook Milligan)]

Jukka Salmi writes:
 > BTW, does it really make sense to provide all those TeX, LaTeX etc.
 > packages from pkgsrc?  TeX Live has its own package manager (tlmgr), so
 > less redundant work needs to be done if we'd provide just tlmgr and the
 > TL binaries from pkgsrc and instruct the user to use tlmgr to install
 > the desired packages.  And with tlmgr you're able to install collections
 > and schemes (sets of packages) which gets you a useful TL installation
 > quite fast.  Of course this could be achieved by meta packages in
 > pkgsrc, but then again much redundant work would need to be done...

I agree that redundant work would be nice to eliminate.  At the same
time, a unified means of setting up and managing a system is _really_
valuable and should not be glossed over.  Thus, I suggest that we seek
a means of harnessing the capacity of something like tlmgr within
pkgsrc.

I will point out that R is another example of a system that has its
own way of installing R packages.  That is, there is an R command
specifically for installing packages that have been downloaded.  That
has all been abstracted into a common Makefile to be included by R
packages within pkgsrc.  As a result, pkgsrc files for R packages are
almost trivial to construct.  Often the process takes less time than
it does to perform the actual download and building steps.  If there
existed a repository with the right index information, it would even
be possible to automate the process of creating each R package within
pkgsrc.  The end result is that the actual work is largely delegated
to the native capability within R, but the entire system is manageable
within pkgsrc.

I think something like this would be an appropriate solution for TeX
as well.

Cheers,
Brook