[tex-live] inclusion of texlive-includernw

Roger Bivand Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
Sun Nov 11 14:46:45 CET 2018


On Sun, 11 Nov 2018, Norbert Preining wrote:

> Hi,
>
> as Karl said, this seems to be a Fedora only issue.
>
> Furthermore, I am suprised about this:
>
>> havoc for those who upgrade texlive because texlive-includernw tries to
>> install R and many R packages without checking whether they are installed
>> elsewhere. I can't see a list of maintainers of
>
> Do you mean *using* the .sty file and running a tex file using it
> installs R packages? I looked into the sty file and only saw R code
> being executed of the form
> 	library('knitr')
> 	..
> On my system this does *not* automatically install anything, but gives
> an error if knitr is not installed.
>
> OTOH, if the *Fedora package* (rpm) depends on R packages, then this is
> the correct way to satisfy dependencies. This is how *every* package
> manager works.

No, not every. The R package manager (so the R code in this latex package) 
advises limiting the number of dependencies (Depends, Imports) as far as 
possible, and moving everything else into Suggests, which are checked at 
run time, not install time. A user then finding an unfulfilled dependency 
at run time is at liberty to install the missing workflow components, but 
is never left without a choice by the packaging system.

So "correct" has many flavours. I will try to trace the Fedora packager, 
and follow up with the author of includernw, who certainly did not ask for 
the latex package to be rolled out at least to all texlive-scheme-medium 
users on Fedora.

Roger

>
> Thanks
>
> Norbert
>
> --
> PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
> Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13
>

-- 
Roger Bivand
Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics,
Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen, Norway.
voice: +47 55 95 93 55; e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2392-6140
https://scholar.google.no/citations?user=AWeghB0AAAAJ&hl=en


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