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Re: Issues with and after upgrade to texlive



Hi Frans,

many thanks for your feedback!


Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl> wrote:

> I was just on the point of making the switch from teTeX to TeX Live on one 
> system until I noticed that installing Tex Live would take a whopping
> 591 MB of extra diskspace if one follows aptitude...
>
> After first upgrading only unrelated packages, things became a bit more 
> manageable. It turned out that unselecting a number of recommended 
> packages I could actually do with only 23 MB more diskspace [1], without 
> at first seeming to lose any important functionality.
>
> [1] Ignoring diskspace freed by not replacing tetex-doc (61 MB) with 
> texlive-doc (85 MB).
>
> At first I also had the texlive meta package unselected. Adding that back 
> got me back to 201 MB _extra_ diskspace again, so I've decided to see if 
> I can do without or not...

All the metapackages are meant as convenience for users.  If you want a
minimal installation for a particular purpose, e.g. building a package
or document, you should select individual packages.  For example,
"texlive" as well as "tetex-bin" will select ConTeXt (from an external
source package) which isn't needed at all if you process LaTeX
documents. 

> Next I noticed that this would still leave me without any hyphenation 
> support for languages the installer builds. Adding back those I currently 
> need resulted in 89.6 MB _extra_ diskspace again.
> Note that it is rather unfortunate that these cannot be easily installed 
> automatically (at least without installing _a lot_ more packages by build 
> depending on texlive-full) as this will mean they may not be pulled in 
> during a lot of builds on buildds and thus no or suboptimal hyphenation 
> in a lot of our documentation!
> I would strongly suggest introducing a meta package texlive-lang-all. Also 
> because depending on individual texlive-lang-* packages would mean 
> running the risk of missing new languages when they become available.

Yepp, that's probably the way to go.

> All in all, the upgrade is far from straightforward if you like your 
> system relatively clean and texlive seems incredibly more diskhungry than 
> tetex was.



>
>
> After installing what I thought I needed (and having the dependencies from 
> jadetex satisfied), I tried building the installation guide, but ended up 
> with:
> $ jadetex build.tmp/install.en.tex
> This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
>  %&-line parsing enabled.
> ---! /var/lib/texmf/web2c/jadetex.fmt was written by pdfetex
> (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
>
> No idea what to do with this...

jadetex has a RC bug which I'm currently investigating.  But this sounds
a bit like a different thing, and might be related to your
configuration.  What's the output of 

grep jadetex /etc/texmf/fmt.d/*
grep jadetex /var/lib/texmf/web2c/fmtutil.cnf

> Some packages for which I'm not sure if I'll need them or not are:
> - lmodern

Recommended for new documents, but not needed unless the toolchain which
generates LaTeX code is changed.

> - pgf

Not needed if you don't know about it, or install latex-beamer which
Depends on it

> - texlive-font-utils

Not needed if you don't know anything about the CTAN packages in the
long description

> - texlive-fonts-extra

If you need that for any generated code, it's either a bug in the code
generator or in texlive splitting.  Only when you decide you want one of
these fonts for your personal hand-made documents, then it's time to
install it.

> - texlive-generic-recommended
> - texlive-generic-extra

While these *might* be useful with LaTeX in special cases, usually they
will be used by other formats (Plain TeX and such).

> Here is what I ended up with for now. Possibly I can still remove the 
> hlatex packages now.

hlatex is needed for some chinese documents; I wouldn't install it
unless required by dependencies.  



Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)



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