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> the absolute state of the tooling of the modern world Hah, TeX Live is... not that. It's been enormous since I installed it off a CD in the 90s. The idea, a
by samatman 4y ago
> the absolute state of the tooling of the modern world
Hah, TeX Live is... not that.
It's been enormous since I installed it off a CD in the 90s. The idea, and it works, is that you can just compile anyone's stuff out of the TeX ecosystem.
There is just... a lot... in it. You don't need a package manager if you install the whole universe locally. Like I said: not what I would call a modern approach to tooling.
On the other hand, I have latex files from the mid-Noughties and, I don't even need to check: they'll compile if I want them to.
But yeah, if you want just a little piece of TeX here and there, you're off the beaten track. That's not how TUG rolls.
- rdlw 4y agoTeX Live can also be configured to install the bare minimum TeX ecosystem (or just TeX+LaTeX), which only takes a few minutes to download and install but results in hunting down dependencies and manually installing them whenever you want to use a new package. It also seems quite slow to update, and a recent (?) name change of `tools' to `latex-tools' seems to have broken multicol, which drove me to MikTeX. Internet connection required, but far less headache.
- rob74 4y agoOld approach: "we don't have a lot of disk space, we have to be careful what we install". More modern approach: "hey, we have a lot of disk space, we can install everything locally". Even more modern approach: "hey, we have fast Internet access, we only have to install stuff when we need it".
- mistrial9 4y agoall three of those ways are important today; modern is overrated