[tex-live] problem with babel package

George N. White III gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue May 24 20:25:43 CEST 2011


On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Philipp Stephani <st_philipp at yahoo.de> wrote:
>

>
> Outside of this thread the discussion seems to converge to "always install TL from the net and never from the system repositories":
>
> http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18939
>
> So your first option seems to be the state of the art solution. Given that, it might be best to remove all dependencies to TeX Live in the Linux distribution repos: often users want to install e.g. Kile and can't do so without installing the distro's TL they don't want (at least on Ubuntu that happened all the time).
> Still I think that e.g. TL 2009 is good enough for most ordinary people (it's newer than Word 2007, after all ;-), but I'm not the one to decide that, of course.
>

Those dependencies are very helpful to users who just know they need
kile, and also people building any of  the packages that use TeX to
format documentation.

Disk is cheap.   It is entirely possible to have a distro texlive
coexist with the current CTAN version on
a system, but you can't let CTAN TL create symbolic links in /usr/bin.

The way to deal with dependencies is to create a dummy package.
Usually someone posts a
recipe somewhere on the web.

The problem is that distros have not paid much attention to the cases
where users need to circumvent
the standard packages, so you end up with a bunch of halfway measures.
  There are many cases now
where distros support alternatives for things like java and flash.
Some packages just install and run a
3rd party installer.   I suspect something along those lines could be
done for CTAN TL, but I suspect
it would kill the CTAN mirrors when traffic increases by a couple
orders of magnitude.


-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia



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