Re: TexLive

[Patrick Reich <reichp%austin.rr.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 2009-07-30 at 11:39 +0200, Jukka Salmi wrote:
> Min Sik Kim --> pkgsrc-users (2009-07-30 00:44:01 -0700):
> > At Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:40:40 -0500,
> > Patrick Reich <reichp%austin.rr.com@localhost> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Does anyone know if TUG plans to include NetBSD binaries on the 2009
> > > DVD?
> > 
> > See http://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html.  There is a volunteer
> > builder for NetBSD/i386.
> 
> I [1]discussed providing TL binaries for NetBSD with Karl Berry and we
> agreed that it doesn't make much sense since there are too many
> combinations of ports, releases and ways to run X11.  However, maybe it
> would make sense to provide binaries for the latest i386 release (i.e.
> netbsd-5 with native Xorg) since that's probably the most frequently
> used combination?
> 
> 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...

Thanks to all of you who responded about TL.  I have used tlmgr
to maintain Texlive on other systems and the tool does a very
nice job of maintaining a complete TL environment.  Having NetBSD
binaries along with tlmgr would certainly reduce the work needed
to get TL installed on NetBSD AND it would eliminate the need for
so many of the tex-* packages that are currently in pkgsrc.  I,
for one, found so many of them confusing when trying to determine
what to install first that might pull in the rest.

Many thanks to Min Sik Kim and Jukka Salmi for the work you're
doing to bring TL to NetBSD.  I certainly appreciate your
efforts.

Sincerely,
Patrick