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Date:      Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:37:40 +0100
From:      Jamie Paul Griffin <jamie@kode5.net>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: freebsd-texlive port
Message-ID:  <20121011123740.GA87308@kontrol.kode5.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAJ5UdcMJ_hh_LauTFxwMtDVX7dq5v3Pmh=VF4c6M16cVMZFBDQ@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20121010015528.GA29059@shellx.eskimo.com> <CAJ5UdcNPFnpZki64cBPhL-E77MX4bR1irP_%2B-%2BBiiz4NYzpjjA@mail.gmail.com> <20121010130144.GA12086@osx.kode5.net> <20121010174925.bf530323.freebsd@edvax.de> <20121010160144.GA13359@kontrol.kode5.net> <CAO6-GAc8wQN%2BjNO1sy9Z-NUzC=hxD_oo8mp5HyGD2cPi4pKKyg@mail.gmail.com> <20121010203243.GA705@kontrol.kode5.net> <20121011000342.bb5dc60e.freebsd@edvax.de> <CAJ5UdcMJ_hh_LauTFxwMtDVX7dq5v3Pmh=VF4c6M16cVMZFBDQ@mail.gmail.com>

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[ Antonio Olivares wrote on Thu 11.Oct'12 at  6:39:00 -0500 ]

 
> The efforts by Romain Tartiere should not go unnoticed.  For many
> years now, he has a port to texlive:
> 
> https://code.google.com/p/freebsd-texlive/
> 
> It works with the FreeBSD tools that you mention and it updates the
> packages using the FreeBSD infrastructure.  It happens that many
> people install texlive through the dvd and make several changes so
> that the tetex binaries do not get called on.
> 
> I have the freebsd-texlive port installed and it works beautifully.  I
> can typeset books which require it.  I also use KerTeX,
> 
> http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html
> 
>  which is smaller and also works great in its own right.   What is
> kerTeX:  http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/42234/what-is-kertex
> 
> For many users kerTeX would do the job for many texing/latexing needs.
>  However for bigger jobs, i.e, bigger books with many style files, &
> bigger macros then texlive is needed.  TeTeX does work well for many
> things, but it is *NOT MAINTAINED, NOT UPDATED* despite the efforts of
> some people and packages like tikz don't work well *unless you can
> patch things up in the tex structure to make them work*.

Yes I agree. As well as Romain, Nikola Lecic has done a great deal of work with getting texlive made available for FreeBSD - I'm sure there are others as well.

I recall a couple of years ago, tug.org completely removed support for FreeBSD which prompted, I believe, the projects that Romain and Nikola started. Thanks to Nikola, who I *think* is still involved with the texlive project and namely support for FreeBSD, this problem no longer exists and the texlive distribution now supports FreeBSD. 

KerTeX is something I've yet to try, but I'm extremely interested in what it has to offer. It's innovative and a remarkable amount of work and certainly worth using for those using TeX regularly. NetBSD, or rather pkgsrc, and Linux software packaging systems as I'm sure you know have broken it down into portions of the distribution which is a sensible approach as modest users of TeX will most likely use only a small percentage of the software that comes with texlive. Perhaps a similar approach could be implemented into the FreeBSD ports system.

I do think moving away from tetex for good is needed now. With all the changes to FreeBSD going on, ports relying on a dead project like tetex seems wrong. 



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