Re: More fine-grained control in texlive?
Alexandre Lymberopoulos <lymber@ime.usp.br> wrote:
> I was shocked when I saw a package with 120MB, and there is
> another one even bigger than that?
>
> Could these packages be broken in smaller pieces? I think that many
> users would love to have smaller TeX distributions fitting their
> needs.
>
> I would like to suggest, for example, that documentation should be kept
> apart from the packages itself and create more -extra and -recommend
> subdivisions.
Splitting off the documentation is feasible (I even have a "that would
be sort of okay, I guess" by Markus Kohm, one of the upstream authors
who advocate for "only distribute as a complete set"), but then the
runtime package would have to Recommmend the respective doc package, and
the standard installation would not be smaller (in lenny all tools are
supposed to automatically install Recommends, aptitude already does in
etch).
Splitting the larger packages in pieces makes only sense if it's done
upstream, because we mirror the upstream divisions. So let's have a
look. Which (binary) packages do you see that are 120MB or even larger?
According to my investigations, in sid those larger than 10MB are
77M texlive-latex-extra_2007.addxml.1-1~1_all.deb
55M texlive-fonts-extra_2007.addxml.1-1~1_all.deb
30M texlive-doc-en_2007-3_all.deb
26M texlive-latex-base_2007-10_all.deb
24M texlive-pstricks_2007.addxml.1-1~1_all.deb
20M texlive-latex-recommended_2007-10_all.deb
14M texlive-publishers_2007.addxml.1-1~1_all.deb
11M texlive-base-bin_2007-12_i386.deb
I don't see how tl-publishers, tl-pstricks and tl-latex-base could be
split, and I don't think it makes much sense to split tl-base-bin, since
most of its contents are needed in a standard installation, anyway.
Splitting tl-latex-extra or tl-latex-recommended would in principle be
possible. But in practice it is quite hard, or rather it won't be
possible without getting packages which contain styles that require
other styles in other packages: Unless we again let them each depend on
each other, the result is "Some parts of this package won't work unless
you install Suggests, too", and that won't be a service to our users.
This is already now a problem with tl-humanities and tl-science which
have been split of tl-latex-extra.
So we're left with tl-fonts-extra and tl-doc-en. I don't see much value
in splitting these; but I'm open to suggestions for a good splitting
scheme.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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