luatex: should we replace with texlive-luatex?

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

I am going through the many TeX-related ports to identify obsolete ones that install software also in TeXLive, to see if any of them should be removed and replaced by the corresponding texlive port. (See ​here and ​here.)

The luatex port seems like it might fit in this category, but I'm not sure. I see that the port provides v0.5.0, which is older than the 0.6.0 in texlive. But I also don't understand how the port is supposed to be used, since it provides only the binaries and needs a separate texmf tree (what are you supposed to use for that?)

Should we replace luatex with texlive-luatex, or is there a reason to keep it around as a separate port?

[patrick@…]

I think it is obsolete now.

Both provided binaries (luatex and texlua) can be used without any other software. luatex is the TeX binary and it is usable by itself only by experts. texlua is a Lua interpreter with several added libraries (such as zip file extraction, sockets, unicode, lpeg, ...) so there could be a use for that itself.

The port texlive-luatex is probably much more than this. So users that just want a texlua interpreter install "too much". My conclusion: there are IMO reasons to keep the LuaTeX port, but not really strong ones.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

I'm still not sure on what to do, so I'll leave the decision of whether to keep or remove the port up to you. (I don't know a lot about luatex myself)

I had figured you needed a tex distribution to do anything useful with the binaries, in which case it seemed like replacing it with texlive was an obvious step. I wasn't aware that texlua is useful as an interpreter by itself. Is this something people actually do? If so, we should probably keep the port around, and preferably bring it up to date too.

[patrick@…]

OK, I'll update LuaTeX this week.

[drkp (Dan Ports)]

Sounds good. We'll close this one.