[Fedora] Re: native texlive and yum

[Walter Cazzola]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2011, suvayu ali wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 1:55 PM, Walter Cazzola <cazzola at dico.unimi.it> wrote:
>> That has been a great idea except for a couple of issues on some
>> *nonrelated" packages. To remove texlive yum forced the remotion of a2ps
>> and R-core (and few other but these are the most important for me) and I
>> can't reinstall them without reinstalling texlive (at least in part).

> Although it might seem so, but they might not be entirely independent.

yes I know they use LaTeX to render something but they can work also
without LaTeX so if someone want these tools is forced to install LaTeX
as well.

>> Now I've already installed texlive but not through yum and I'm wondering
>> why the rpm for these packages not really related to LaTeX and in
>> any case working also without LaTeX can't check for the bins instead of
>> the whole package.

> That is how rpm (or any other package manager works). Checking for
> binaries can be ambiguous as some package might not place the binaries
> in the path the package manager might check.

uhm this is not convincing me, to avoid misplaced binaries there are
several methods, where, which, the only mandatory point is to have the
binaries you are looking for in the PATH that is not such a big issue
since I'm supposing you want to use them.

I think this is just an issue of laziness since it is easier to have
hard dependencies and let the rpm dbms to deal with them rather than to
check real dependencies thoroughly.

>> Is there a way for forcing their installation without installing
>> texlive?

> If you don't mind the disk space taken by the rpm version of texlive,
> you can solve the problem with setting your environment variables
> appropriately. This is how I get around this issue:

I know about this possibility but I'd prefer to save 200Mb and to have a
cleaner installation.

Thanks for the advice 
Walter

-- 
Walter Cazzola, PhD - Associate Professor, DICo, University of Milano
E-mail: cazzola at dico.unimi.it  Ph.: +39 02 503 16300  Fax: +39 02 503 16253
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