tetex is dead

[zach@…]

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.

[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.

[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

[josh+macports@…]

List of ports that contain the string "tetex"

[josh+macports@…]

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

[josh+macports@…]

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

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[raimue@…]

Replying to shreevatsa.public@gmail.com:

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

Added you manually to CC.

[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)...

[jmr@…]

Switched over the nomaintainer ports in r36283.

[jmr@…]

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.

[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.

[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.

[raimue@…]

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

[reilles@…]

There should be no problems for auctex and bibtex2html

[jmr@…]

Switched over the remaining dependencies in r37228.