Re: texlive organization on netbsd

[Cág <ca6c%bitmessage.ch@localhost>]

Mayuresh wrote:
 
> There are close to 5000 packages right now and it will only keep
> growing. Assuming pkgsrc is widely used (and we all would love to see
> that) some user or the other at some point of time or the other would
> require any of them. Shall we be spending effort on mapping packages
> that are that large in number? (Even factoring in the packages are
> clubbed when mapping to pkgsrc.)

If your concern is the overall package number, then it's not a problem:
it can be virtually infinite. There's a huge amount of software not yet
packaged. For example, pkgsrc.se says there's 18k packages, and
freshports claims 34+k "ports".

> I ack'ed the ease of creation of package. But that's not all. Getting it
> into pkgsrc is not as automatic. It will take its own course. There
> will be different views on granularity of the package etc. (and for good
> reason) but it will add to latency of getting a package.
> A document preparer would be looking for a quick solution. As it is,
> sometimes choosing a package is a matter of trial and error. One may
> not get the desired results and may want to try alternative packages
> before choosing one. Creating package would be already a digression from
> his work. Wonder whether such user would like the added inertia of
> creating packages and waiting for the commits etc.

If you need something right now, build it and put it in /usr/local.

There are maintainers that work specifically with TeX or Python, ask
them or the list.

Know what you need before installing it anyway.
 
> And upkeep for that large package count means a lot of ongoing effort. 

Most of the time it's just "package and forget till the next release" :)
 
> Importantly, we are talking about a general problem with the likes of
> texlive, python, R, nodejs and may be more. We have already made a
> different call in other places - at least python and nodejs.

I stay away from Python and anything JS-related :) And we use Fortran
where probably R can be used, so I can't really tell. As for TeX, I like
the way it's packaged, and, like I said, if I'd need something, I'd
simply write a Makefile. It's yet to happen though. 

-- 
caóc