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Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:20:22 -0400
From: Ken Brown <kbrown AT cornell DOT edu>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Unwanted texlive invasion
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[Please don't top-post.]

On 9/25/2012 2:10 PM, Wynfield Henman wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
>> On 9/25/2012 11:41 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm trying to upgrade a set of existing cygwin packages, and texlive
>>> suddenly wants to install itself, apparently due to a new dependency
>>> from gnuplot. Is this really necessary?
>>
>>
>> This dependency is created by cygport.  It's of course up to the gnuplot
>> maintainer (Volker Zell) whether or not he wants to override it, but I can
>> explain the rationale.  gnuplot installs some files into
>> /usr/share/texmf-dist.  To make it possible for tex to find those files, the
>> gnuplot postinstall script runs /usr/bin/mktexlsr.  The latter is provided
>> by texlive-collection-basic, so this package is required by gnuplot.
>>
>> Maybe you should just bite the bullet and install texlive.  It won't
>> interfere in any way with your native TeX Live installation, as long as you
>> put the bin directory for the latter first in your path.

 > I don't agree.  The solution should not be to install an unnecessary
 > package and waste space and complicate by having to check order in the
 > PATH variable.

People who install programs that are not provided by Cygwin have to 
expect to set PATH appropriately, including checking the order of the paths.

 > It would be better that a.) installation scripts check for the
 > existence of the necessary commands first and not brute force the
 > installation or warning that the cygwin port of it be installed.

For the issue being discussed in this thread (the gnuplot dependency on 
texlive-collection-basic), the necessary command *is* /usr/bin/mktexlsr. 
  Running the mktexlsr provided by the native TeX Live distribution will 
not do the job (which is to make the files installed in 
/usr/share/texmf-dist accessible to tex).

 > It may also be desirable, to have setup use a list of packages to NOT
 > install, regardless of any dependencies.

I don't think setup.exe should make it quite that easy for people to 
circumvent dependencies.  But maybe something like the Debian "equivs" 
facility would be useful (see http://www.tug.org/texlive/debian.html for 
a discussion of this in the context of TeX Live).

As usual, it's easy to come up with ideas for enhancing setup.exe; but

   http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#SHTDI

Ken


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