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Ticket #12913 (closed enhancement: fixed)

Opened 13 months ago

Last modified 6 months ago

tetex is dead

Reported by: zach@… Owned by: gwright@…
Priority: Normal Milestone: Port Enhancements
Component: ports Version: 1.5.0
Keywords: Cc: jmr@…, milosh@…, shreevatsa.public@…, eridius@…, reilles@…, mas@…, stechert@…, pguyot@…, dan.kelley@…, j.stalnaker@…, tristan@…, mww@…
Port:

Description

The tetex port should be replaced somehow. The tetex distribution is dead, i.e., it's former maintainer has stopped maintaining it.

There are 2 issues: 1. Many people on the mac install some other TeX distribution. For instance I have chosen TeXLive, which is sort of an "official" distro. It works well. 2. Since most non-macports tex distibutions bring their "own" directory hierarchy, and since a tex distro takes almost 1 GB of disk space, I think it is really too much of a waste of space to have a second, "parallel" tex installation by macports.

So macports really should detect whether or not there is already a tex installation (at least one of the usual "suspects"); and only if there is none, then it should install it's own.

Best regards, Gabriel.

Attachments

tetex-ports.txt (382 bytes) - added by josh+macports@… 10 months ago.
List of ports that contain the string "tetex"
tetex-maintainers.txt (384 bytes) - added by josh+macports@… 10 months ago.
List of maintainers of ports that contain the string "tetex"
teTeX-texlive.patch (6.7 KB) - added by josh+macports@… 10 months ago.
make all ports that depend on teTeX and have no maintainer depend on texlive instead.

Change History

  Changed 13 months ago by milosh@…

Macports should propose texlive, not rely on possibly broken other installations.

Once we have a portfile for texlive, it will be possible to switch dependencies from teTeX to texlive, keeping teTeX as a possible alternative. Even though teTeX is no more maintained and its developper suggest to switch to texlive, teTeX works well (some of my tex files don't compile well with texlive, so for the moment, I prefer using teTeX).

As a side note, "a tex distro takes almost 1 GB of disk space" is false. texlive is truely enormous: a 700MB fetch and installs hugely, teTeX is lighter (my installed teTeX is 278MB) and there exists a BasicTeX package (based on TeXlive) that is just 40 MB large and contains more or less everything useful.

  Changed 13 months ago by ryandesign@…

  • cc zach@…, milosh@…, gwright@… added
  • owner changed from macports-dev@… to gwright@…

  Changed 12 months ago by milosh@…

There is now a portfile for texlive. It is still new and not exhaustively tested.

And it is far from 1GB on your disk:

% du -hs ~dp/software/texlive*
 23M    /opt/local/var/macports/software/texlive
340M    /opt/local/var/macports/software/texlive_texmf-minimal

Changed 10 months ago by josh+macports@…

List of ports that contain the string "tetex"

Changed 10 months ago by josh+macports@…

List of maintainers of ports that contain the string "tetex"

Changed 10 months ago by josh+macports@…

make all ports that depend on teTeX and have no maintainer depend on texlive instead.

follow-up: ↓ 5   Changed 10 months ago by Damien.Pollet@…

Would it be possible to make a placeholder package for a TeX installation?

This package itself would be empty but it would ensure that there is either tetex or texlive or any other TeX port installed. One of those ports could also be a placeholder for an external TeX distro and warn that you should know what you are doing if you install it.

in reply to: ↑ 4   Changed 10 months ago by josh+macports@…

Replying to Damien.Pollet@gmail.com:

This package itself would be empty but it would ensure that there is either tetex or texlive or any other TeX port installed.

This is almost what a dependency like path:${prefix}/bin/tex:texlive does. It will be fulfilled by any TeX distribution installed through MacPorts, and if none is installed, it will be fulfilled by installing texlive.

One of those ports could also be a placeholder for an external TeX distro and warn that you should know what you are doing if you install it.

Such a port won't be accepted into the standard MacPorts distribution. Ports aren't meant to make use of the software that comes with OS X (with a very few exceptions like X11 and gcc), let alone user-installed packages. But, there's nothing stopping anyone from making themselves a local port that just places some symlinks under ${prefix} that point to an external TeX installation, if they really want to.

  Changed 10 months ago by bcbarnes@…

in regards to the teTex-texlive.patch , there is another port which needs listing now:

py25-pyx depends on tetex. this is a recently added port, and essentially is an update of py-pyx to a new version of pyx. it also depends on a different version of python and has a zlib dependency (I do not know if those two differences are actually required, but I defer to the portfile author).

follow-ups: ↓ 8 ↓ 9   Changed 9 months ago by shreevatsa.public@…

Posting comment to get cc-ed. (This works, right?)

Although MacPorts's policy is to not depend on external software, it is my experience that the right/easy way to install a TeX distribution is through MacTeX (the 700 MB package that comes with everything), so I'm interested in getting ports working with an externally installed MacTeX. I was thinking of starting with AucTeX sometime this week. IMHO, a TeX distribution is one of those few things that are best installed externally, and MacPort's texlive distribution comes with no assurance of being as well integrated into Mac OS X (the "TeX distribution" preference pane, for example) as MacTeX.

in reply to: ↑ 7   Changed 9 months ago by raimue@…

  • cc shreevatsa.public@… added

Replying to shreevatsa.public@gmail.com:

Posting comment to get cc-ed. (This works, right?)

Added you manually to CC.

in reply to: ↑ 7 ; follow-up: ↓ 12   Changed 9 months ago by milosh@…

Replying to shreevatsa.public@gmail.com:

I'm interested in getting ports working with an externally installed MacTeX.

It would be possible provided you have the right links in ${prefix}/bin (bibtex, latex and maybe a few other). In fact, macports dependency engine allows for depending on a file being present instead of a full port, and it was agreed that ports depending on tex should use that dependency scheme.

You could try a 'ln -s mactex/s/location/latex /opt/local/bin/latex' and 'ln -s mactex/s/location/bibtex /opt/local/bin/bibtex' and see if things depending on tex install well. Then you could contribute a port that just puts the good links in /opt/local/bin (a little like what the 'texlive' port does)...

  Changed 7 months ago by jmr@…

  • cc zach@…, gwright@… removed

Switched over the nomaintainer ports in r36283.

  Changed 7 months ago by jmr@…

  • cc eridius@…, reilles@…, mas@…, stechert@…, pguyot@…, dan.kelley@…, j.stalnaker@…, tristan@…, mww@… added

Remaining ports that depend on teTeX:

Ports Maintainer
caml-pcre eridius
auctex, bibtex2html reilles@…
mftrace mas
DoCon, breqn gwright
octave stechert
dvipdfmx, tex-tipa, xdvipdfmx, XeTeX pguyot@…
gri dan.kelley@…, j.stalnaker@…
BibTool, gtamacfonts tristan@…
tetex-rechnung mww

Adding their maintainers to cc.

in reply to: ↑ 9   Changed 7 months ago by shreevatsa.public@…

Replying to milosh@macports.org:

Replying to shreevatsa.public@gmail.com:

I'm interested in getting ports working with an externally installed MacTeX.

It would be possible provided you have the right links in ${prefix}/bin (bibtex, latex and maybe a few other). In fact, macports dependency engine allows for depending on a file being present instead of a full port, and it was agreed that ports depending on tex should use that dependency scheme.

That is great news! I wonder how I missed this. If there is consensus, I propose the following solution:

You could try a 'ln -s mactex/s/location/latex /opt/local/bin/latex' and 'ln -s mactex/s/location/bibtex /opt/local/bin/bibtex' and see if things depending on tex install well. Then you could contribute a port that just puts the good links in /opt/local/bin (a little like what the 'texlive' port does)...

That would not be necessary, if the following solution were adopted, which is a tool for exactly this sort of thing:

The MacTeX distribution (which is what most LaTeX sites recommend installing) comes with a preference pane which shows up in System Preferences as "TeX Distribution". This is a smart tool that detects existing TeX distributions (such as its own TeXLive 2007, or gwTeX, or Fink's teTeX, or MacPorts's teTeX), and provides radio buttons for the user to choose which distribution he/she wants to use, and places corresponding links in /usr/texbin. This means that one can try out new distributions on the fly without disturbing existing distributions.

So all MacPorts has to do is include "/usr/texbin" at the front of its binpath; then *any* distribution would automatically be available for ports that depend on "bin:tex". I have successfully installed auctex this way by putting /usr/texbin in macports.conf, and I can confirm it works.

jmr: Awesome, thanks! It would be great to phase out teTeX.

  Changed 6 months ago by jmr@…

In a couple of days I'm going to declare a maintainer timeout for all the ports listed in comment:11, and I will then switch each one over to texlive unless it's obvious to me from the portfile that there's a good reason for not doing so. If your port shouldn't be switched over, say so now.

  Changed 6 months ago by raimue@…

XeTeX is already included in texlive, so switching the dependency for this port is not reasonable.

  Changed 6 months ago by reilles@…

There should be no problems for auctex and bibtex2html

  Changed 6 months ago by jmr@…

  • cc jmr@… added
  • status changed from new to closed
  • resolution set to fixed

Switched over the remaining dependencies in r37228.

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