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Bug#655545: please remove sagetex/ directories from texlive-latex-extra-*



On Tue, 17 Jan 2012 at 11:58AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> I thought SageTeX is included in the manual Sage install?  Then why are
> the tex files not put into /usr/local/temxf/...?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to discuss the installation
process for software not available in Debian, but: when doing a manual
Sage install, the tex files get put into /usr/local/texmf only if (1)
the user actually has the ability to do so, and (2) the user exercises
that ability. Many Sage users do not have root permissions on the
computers on which they install Sage, so installing into
/usr/local/texmf is not possible.

We do suggest using /usr/local/texmf (or, perhaps more properly,
TEXMFLOCAL, since we support OS X and Solaris) and TEXMFHOME in our
installation guide: http://sagemath.org/doc/installation/sagetex.html.
But as you can imagine, not everyone reads that.

However, many people quite like that Sage is very self-contained --
running Sage does not require making other changes to your system. Part
of this is because of the non-privileged users mentioned above, and part
of this is because Sage ships with many of its own versions of software
that may be installed on the system. This may seem wasteful, but it is
necessary to make sure that Sage works properly. Being self-contained is
a big selling point, as it were, so many users forget that they might
need to install SageTeX files elsewhere on the system.

...and then, having forgotten (or never learned in the first place),
they try SageTeX, and when they try to typeset their document, they get
truly strange errors because the .sty file from TeXLive and the Python
module included in Sage do not match and do not work together.

If you remove the SageTeX files from Debian, then those users will get
"LaTeX Error: File `sagetex.sty' not found." which is far more likely to
be helpful to them. And the users who haven't installed Sage will never
miss those files.

Regards,

Dan

--
---  Dan Drake
-----  http://mathsci.kaist.ac.kr/~drake
-------

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