Talk:TeX Live

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Latest comment: 25 June 2023 by Pavlov in topic tlmgr bug has not yet been resolved

Should add MiKTeX as an alternative, and change/rename the article to discuss 'TeX'

There are now several valid distributions of TeX available for Linux, including (but not limited to) TeX Live, MiKTeX, and Tectonic.

TeX Live, especially as provided by Arch, where most people recommend installing texlive-most, is an immense meta-package. Furthermore, I feel the various texlive packages go against the entire grain and philosophy of Arch, which is to be able to iteratively build a system to one's preferences and conveniences. The other TeX packages on the Arch repositories are abstractions and collections of CTAN packages, most of which are almost never going to be used by the average LaTeXer, so foisting such a giant download will be problematic.

In turn, MiKTeX, being a 'just enough TeX' install, fits the Arch philosophy better. With the MiKTeX executables, packages and their recursive dependencies are automatically pulled if not installed locally, which saves a huge amount of space. Tectonic is also an alternative distribution, but I haven't used it much.

Therefore, I suggest renaming this article to cover TeX distributions for Linux as a whole, and offer all alternatives as valid options instead of merely focusing on TeX Live.

--Sc ramjet (talk) 07:32, 25 September 2021 (UTC)Reply

I just created a Tectonic page. I've been using tectonic for a few days, and I find it amazing. Self-contained and automatically downloads packages. Very recently has been added to the official repos. --Arcstur (talk) 14:15, 13 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
I added now an 'alternatives' section, but don't know if that's the best way to do it. Maybe renaming the artcile to TeX and showing the options is better. Since I'm new here, I don't feel ready to do that. Anyway, I also think that both MikTex (didn't work for me) and Tectonic suit the Arch philosophy better.--Arcstur (talk) 19:16, 14 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
The page details TeX Live workings, so renaming the page does not make sense. We could talk about creating a new page for general comparison of TeX distributions. — Lahwaacz (talk) 21:15, 14 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

tlmgr bug has not yet been resolved

We're in 2022 and people still have to edit tlmgr.pl in order to make it functional, and every new update to that file should be manually handled. Why is there no permanent fix to this simple problem, is this an issue of TeXLive or a PKGBUILD problem? Pavlov (talk) 23:27, 18 February 2022 (UTC)Reply

Is there a bug report for this supposed bug? — Lahwaacz (talk) 17:14, 20 February 2022 (UTC)Reply
There is now https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/74404 Gustaphe (talk) 13:04, 8 April 2022 (UTC)Reply

Now with texlive-basic package tlmgr seems to work properly even without this "fix". Pavlov (talk) 18:36, 25 June 2023 (UTC)Reply