should have a tex metaport

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

We should have a tex metaport that ports can depend on if they need some TeX distribution installed, but not any particular one.

It should have variants for TeX Live, MacTeX, and pTeX. texlive should be the default variant unless one of the others is already installed (keeping in mind that MacTeX installs into /usr/texbin).

Possibly for the mactex variant it should symlink appropriate binaries from /usr/texbin/bin into $prefix/bin?

Most ports that now depend on texlive should be changed to point to this metaport instead (unless they really require texlive specifically)

Besides providing an option for people who want to use MacTeX, this could save us a lot of pain if we want to add a new TeX distribution option (as when texlive replaced tetex).

Will work on this once texlive 2009 is in.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

Some possibly-relevant messages:

• ​http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2010-June/012065.html
• ​http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-dev/2010-June/012066.html

[adfernandes (Andrew Fernandes)]

Cc Me!

[adfernandes (Andrew Fernandes)]

I have a suggestion: there appear to be a couple of big packages (TeX is one, perhaps Qt4 is another) that users may want on their systems to be decoupled from MacPorts. Can there be a small list of "big apps" that MacPorts just knows about?

For TeX specifically, MacTeX and TeXLive both install into /usr/texbin, and use symlinks to point that to whatever dir the actual install is in. So could MacPorts just check to see if /usr/texbin is present for TeX related ports?

Kind-of hack-ish, yes... but the only alternatives that I see are either this or getting users to edit their macports.conf to uncomment the PATH variable and add /usr/texbin... or mistakenly have two copies of TeXLive.

[orez.org@…]

Cc Me!

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

I'm no longer particularly enthused about this idea. Part of the problem with supporting multiple tex distributions is that they're organized differently. MacTeX is divided into thousands of packages but installs them all by default. The texlive ports are divided into ~80 packages, with only the most common ones installed by default. pTeX is a single monolithic distribution, as was teTeX.

I'm trying to get ports that need specific tex functionality to depend on the minimal package that fits that need. Some need only texlive-basic, others need texlive-latex, others need texlive-latex-recommended or texlive-pictures or texlive-htmlxml, etc. Depending on a port:tex would make this impossible.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

As noted in the previous comment, I don't think this is a good idea because it would prevent us from specifying fine-grained dependencies on tex ports, which I think is important for us to support. What we are doing now wrt MacTeX seems to be about the best we can do given the current dependency framework.

[orez.org@…]

I should add that it is also very easy to install texlive independently of macports, see for instance:

​https://github.com/meduz/dotfiles/blob/master/init/osx_install_tex_live.sh