Maybe there's a good reason for the split, but app-text/texlive is splitted in a lot of packages under dev-texlive/*. At least some of them (maybe even all) are triggered by appropriate USE flags for app-text/texlive. I wonder why they aren't merged in the main package and built/installed accordingly to the use flags as it's commonly done in Gentoo. There is also a app-text/texlive-core that should be merged with app-text/texlive as well. This is especially strange for language support. There are: 24 dev-texlive/texlive-documentation-* packages 31 dev-texlive/texlive-lang* packages As well as these other packages: dev-texlive/texlive-basic dev-texlive/texlive-bibtexextra dev-texlive/texlive-context dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra dev-texlive/texlive-fontsrecommended dev-texlive/texlive-fontutils dev-texlive/texlive-formatsextra dev-texlive/texlive-games dev-texlive/texlive-genericextra dev-texlive/texlive-genericrecommended dev-texlive/texlive-htmlxml dev-texlive/texlive-humanities dev-texlive/texlive-latex dev-texlive/texlive-latexextra dev-texlive/texlive-latexrecommended dev-texlive/texlive-luatex dev-texlive/texlive-mathextra dev-texlive/texlive-metapost dev-texlive/texlive-music dev-texlive/texlive-omega dev-texlive/texlive-pictures dev-texlive/texlive-plainextra dev-texlive/texlive-pstricks dev-texlive/texlive-publishers dev-texlive/texlive-science dev-texlive/texlive-texinfo dev-texlive/texlive-xetex Reproducible: Always
I am only a texlive user on gentoo, but I think that the current state is more appropriate for a huge project like tex, mainly for two reasons: 1. It makes sense to split such a huge project: a) Installing the whole thing in one run is a major issue on machines with limited harddisk scpae. E.g. on my laptop I could not keep all *.tar.bz2 files and the installed data simultaneously; installing "in portions" (from several smaller *.tar.bz2 files) is possible. b) When upgrading some part (e.g. for security issues) only that part needs to be reinstalled. (For tex the issue is not the compilation time, but the point mentioned in a). 2. The fine-granulation e.g. for the languages makes perfectly sense for TeX: You might want to install lots of languages if you receive many different tex-files you have to compile, but you will probably want to install the corresponding docs or sources only for the languages you are actively using. So I like it very much that I can set USE="doc source" per language/package.
(In reply to comment #0) > Maybe there's a good reason for the split, but app-text/texlive is splitted > in a lot of packages under dev-texlive/*. > At least some of them (maybe even all) are triggered by appropriate USE > flags for app-text/texlive. I wonder why they aren't merged in the main > package and built/installed accordingly to the use flags as it's commonly > done in Gentoo. Packages distributions that used to be monolithic ebuilds and are split ebuilds now, off the top of my head: - GNOME - KDE - TeX - Qt - X11 There are probably a few more. The reasoning? When you need an additional, small TeX library, you don't need to recompile the one huge bulk of the distribution all over.
Note that most of these packages aren't actually built, the build time is negligible (except for app-text/texlive-core, which takes ~7minutes on my system, and dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra which takes ~2 minutes). Splitting each language in a different package is not done in any of the other huge projects you mentioned, so it surprised me to see it in a smaller one as TeX. The points raised by Martin (especially point 2) may be good reasons though, at least for some users. @Martin: Note that except texlive-core (126MB), most other packages have much smaller distfiles, and the total (at least in my system) is ~360MB, but your figures may be different if you installed more of these packages. Which packages do you need to merge separately because of disk space?
(In reply to comment #3) > Note that most of these packages aren't actually built, the build time is > negligible (except for app-text/texlive-core, which takes ~7minutes on my > system, and dev-texlive/texlive-fontsextra which takes ~2 minutes). Actual build times vary widely across the plethora of devices great and small, old and new, that Gentoo supports. On one of my systems, a >10 year old UNIX workstation, app-text/texlive-core alone takes more than an hour to emerge on average, (optimistically calculated because I didn't filter out binary merges). With low-cost, low-power devices with little processing power, narrow system buses and low storage space becoming increasingly popular, using typical workstation performance as a measure for comparison is a bit unfair. > Splitting each language in a different package is not done in any of the > other huge projects you mentioned, so it surprised me to see it in a smaller > one as TeX. Why are you generalising like this? Maybe it doesn't make sense to split languages into separate ebuilds for the other projects, or it's impractical to build those separately, or it's impractical to maintain them separately, or language support is controlled through LINGUAS. > The points raised by Martin (especially point 2) may be good reasons though, > at least for some users. First of all, I was mainly interested in establishing that monolithic ebuilds are not "commonly done in Gentoo". Secondly, the single reason I gave you why texlive should be split is perfectly valid: you often find that you want a specific text to have a certain feature that you didn't foresee, or indeed a new language, or some documentation about a module, and waiting for 7 minutes, let alone an hour, to be able to use that feature is rather counter-productive.
