Comments on: Introducing texmfind

By: Vladimir Brik

Vladimir Brik — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:53:33 +0000

I’ve been using texlive without problems for a while, primarily for presentations with beamer and typesetting conference papers.

The only minor annoyance is that a lot of people in academia still use tetex, which typically comes without xelatex and associated packages.

As far as bugs go, here’s a thread about a bug in texlive 2007’s xelatex that affects advanced features of some opentype fonts:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/12669a7a162dd1d9/86a3e4d7091ea20f

It’s not really a Gentoo problem, but if you want, I could file a bug.

By: AlefBet

AlefBet — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 05:53:34 +0000

One thing that might be worth mentioning somewhere prominent is that it’s easier to manage texlive by just merging app-text/texlive (none of the other packages), but using its USE flags to pull in all the other packages. That way you end up with a less cluttered world file and it’s easier to see what you’re pulling in and why just by looking at your /etc/portage/package.use entry.

I started to merge a laundry list of packages to get all the features I wanted, but about halfway through picking them I realized that I could get what I wanted more cleanly by setting my USE flags for the main package and also my LINGUAS.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:25:36 +0000

@François: it’s the “migrate” link in the blog post
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/tex/texlive-migration-guide.xml

By: Francois

Francois — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:17:25 +0000

Alexis, I cannot locate the how-to on the gentoo web-site
could point me in the right direction please.

By: Another Christian

Another Christian — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 10:10:22 +0000

I have switched to TeXlive in the middle of 2007, I think. Since then it has been working better than the previous teTeX installation. It’s great that I do not have to manually copy updated versions of some LaTeX packages into the texmf subdirectories.

Many thanks for the hard work the TeX herd has accomplished!

By: Francois

Francois — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:54:02 +0000

I sent the elog at your Gentoo address.

By: Alexis

Alexis — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:32:34 +0000

@François: thanks for the feedback; I’m interested in these collisions, even if they are with no other packages, that might be stray files. But regarding the packages you mention, they seem to be the ones that install formats and symlinks in /usr/bin; which symlinks were poorly handled with tetex and are not unmerged when removing it.

@Francesco: I’d say a more or less full (full for what I need to do) will be about 200M; that’s a little bit more unfortunately. The minimal set would be texlive-latexrecommended and its deps if you want the ‘latex’ command; but if you want to do a bit more there is the meta ebuild app-text/texlive, it installs nothing but depends on other packages.

By: Francesco

Francesco — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 19:19:02 +0000

Hi.
A tetex installation at the moment is of about 120 mb. How much disk space does texlive requires? and what is the minimal “standard” package set an user could need?

By: Christian

Christian — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:54:46 +0000

And it is keyworded ~x86, thanks for the tool.

By: Francois

Francois — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 18:52:24 +0000

Well feedback time then.
I have been using texlive on both x86 and ppc - I run mainly
stable on both arch. I have mentioned that I run it on ppc
in the stable request ps2eps (#209463) not really the right
place but I have been running it for months on ppc as well.
My last article for Physical Review D and my last conference
slides were produced using texlive so as far as I am concerned it is production ready.
The only itch is that according to my logs (on both x86 and ppc again) there are file collision in texlive-formatsextra,
texlive-latex, texlive-mathextra and texlive-metapost-2007-r1.
It says not to fill bug reports if you don’t have any idea
of the other package with which it collides so I abstained.
Those errors are from November they may have been
solved since then for all I know.