[tex-live] scheme modern

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Fri Jan 7 00:06:35 CET 2011


On 6 January 2011 Zdenek Wagner wrote:

 > 2011/1/6 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:
 > > But many people use XeTeX/LuaTeX in order to typeset Arabic and Asian
 > > scripts. :)
 > >
 > You are right, we are lacking the answer for the most important
 > question: What are the requirements of the users who would like to
 > have reduced-size distribution? Without an answer to this question it
 > is impossible to say what to remove.

The very first questions are: What is the purpose of such a distrubution
and who is supposed to use it?

If you create a distribution for yourself, you know what you need.  If
you do it for others, you have to make assumptions.  And these
assumptions are almost always wrong.  If you ask people what they
need, you'll certainly end up with something significantly larger than
expected.  And if you ask people whether such a scheme is useful, many
people say 'yes', though they'll never use it in practice.

The problem with schemes is that you don't know in advance what they
actually contain and people don't want to investigate.  Indeed, it
takes more time to investigate what a scheme contains than to simply
disable the collections you'll never use in the appropriate menus.

I never used any scheme except scheme-full myself for this reason and
I doubt that many people use them either.  What people want is to
launch the installer and press the install button.

It's also wrong to ask what can be removed, schemes don't work this
way.  You have to ask what's needed.  This is a big difference in
terms of maintenance expenditure because you can't exclude packages
from collections.

IMO these schemes are not very useful, but I can't prevent people from
wasting their time anyway.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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