How to keep a dependency from [continually] appearing in setup

[Ken Brown]

On 8/1/2012 10:18 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
> It can be argued that emacs-auctex should not pull in texlive. Most
> users installing emacs-auctex will already have some flavor of tex in
> place, and not necessarily the cygwin one (like the OP, or perhaps a
> MikTex user). Plus, the error message is pretty intuitive and the
> solution very simple, if latex is not there: "latex: no such command"
> ==> "maybe I should install latex." Therefore, the expected aggregate

There's more to it than that.  emacs-auctex installs stuff needed for 
its preview feature in /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/preview/.  This won't 
be found by native texlive or by MikTeX.

> frustration of users who installed auctex without latex available would
> likely be far lower than the aggregate frustration of users wanting to
> install auctex and getting saddled with an unwanted redundant texlive
> distribution (for which there is no easy solution).

Why is this so frustrating?  It doesn't do any harm (except waste a 
small amount of disk space) to install Cygwin's texlive in parallel with 
native texlive.  Just make sure the bin directory of the latter precedes 
/usr/bin in PATH.  I myself have both installed, since I sometimes find 
it useful for testing purposes to be able to switch from one to the 
other (by temporarily changing PATH).

Ken

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