[tex-live] binaries

George N. White III aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca
Sun Jun 13 19:15:17 CEST 2004


On Sun, 13 Jun 2004, Karl Berry wrote:

>    add perhaps 3 more platforms (a typical set comes in at about 25 mbytes)
>
> I'm not excited about adding more (relatively) obscure platforms.  It is
> hard enough to manage the ones we have.  Also, filling up the compressed
> CD so that we're perpetually having to hack at a package here and a
> package there to reduce the size, as we had to do with demo, sounds like
> a big time sink to me, with little gain.

The biggest time sink occurs when things don't build cleanly.  If 
you do succeed in building on an obscure platform I'd rather see that
documented than get your binaries.  There is something to be said for
encouraging more people to learn how to install a TeX distro from sources.

Binaries are really only necessary for those platforms (Win32, Mac OS) 
where the majority of users lack tools required to build a disto. 
I'd rather see the effort managing binaries and deciding which 
packages to delete from the CD go towards testing/documenting what works 
for the obscure platforms.

> Binaries for any platform can be made available on the web.
> We've done that before.

--
George N. White III  <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
   Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada



More information about the tex-live mailing list