[RFC] Packaging texlive

[Yaakov (Cygwin/X)]

On Tue, 2012-02-28 at 09:22 +0100, Peter Rosin wrote:
> Hi Ken!
> 
> First of all, a big and warm thank you!

IMHO you would have been better off stopping here.

> But I just can't leave this info uncommented, despite the gratitude,
> it is just too long a way from a previous quote about TeX Live
> needing nothing else to be installed and maintained and that TeX
> Live is working OOTB on Cygwin [1].  Missing deps and two clashes
> with existing packages (not counting tetex*) and you call that no
> maintenance?

To me this sounds like you are criticizing Ken for allegedly
underestimating the maintenance burden of TeX Live.  Perhaps you should
rephrase or withdraw this statement to avoid that implication.

To answer your question nonetheless, you are comparing apples and
oranges.  The earlier message is referring to the TeX Live distribution
(which uses its own copies of some deps) using their tlmgr script
(presumably into a unique prefix); now we're discussing integration with
the Cygwin distribution (into /usr with system deps).  The latter has
different considerations, as noted on TeX Live's own website[1].

Given how long TeX has been bitrotting in the Cygwin distribution, it
could be a whole lot worse.


Yaakov

[1] http://tug.org/texlive/distro.html