[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up
Enrico Franconi
franconi at inf.unibz.it
Sat Nov 18 03:21:30 CET 2006
On 17 Nov 2006, at 01:06, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
> People will have to rely on an alternate source for up-to-date
> ghostscript/ImageMagick/etc, which means using a system like fink
> or compiling your own from source and dealing with dependency
> nightmares.
The lack of dependencies' maintenance in the i-installer is what made
me choose fink (with its GUI, FinkCommander), and now darwinports
(with its GUI, PortAuthority) to install libraries and binaries other
than the TeX distribution. If you have a complex unix system, you can
not simply upgrade/uninstall a library without checking whether this
has been used by other stuff, which may depend on it or on a
particular version of it. If you use your computer in several
different ways, the i-installer may disrupt in a very subtle way your
system. It seems to me that the i-installer is very good at its job
for users who do not install any other library in any other way. It
is true, though, that using fink or darwinports requires some
exposure to cli even with their GUIs.
So, if there will be some effort to build an alternative installer
(or unsing MacTeX) for those libraries and binaries, this has to be
done with care; e.g., in a separate directory for the libraries seen
only by those binaries, etc.
Maybe I'm wrong (those observations are based on the first versions
of i-installer, so something may have been changed meanwhile), so
please comment.
cheers
--e.
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