[tex-live] inclusion of texlive-includernw

[Norbert Preining]

Hi Roger,

On Mon, 12 Nov 2018, Roger Bivand wrote:
> OK. I also see that say texlive has internal dependencies between
> components, like R. R has > 13000 contributed packages on CRAN, and almost
> 3000 more on Bioconductor, and we've been very concerned to prune reverse
> dependency trees to limit installation of more than is strictly needed even

CRAN is in a very good situation due to its very strict rules concerning
upload format. CTAN is older and has historically very loose rules,
which CTAN does not want to change now. That means, we have practically
no way of testing.

Alone converting CTAN packages to standard TDS standard as used in TeX
Live (and MikTeX and any other TeX distribution I know) is a crazy task
(see our ctan2tds script), which requires hand-work for each and every
package.

(I sometimes *DREAM* of the level of consistency CRAN has when seeing what
is shipped on CTAN and we need to incorporate)

> if some functionality is inhibited. We do this to permit nightly
> cross-platform checking of all contributed packages hosted on CRAN.

That is something impossible on CTAN level. I am working on doing
something similar on TeX Live level, but this, too, is a very bad task
due to the variety of engines (latex, pdflatex, platex, lualatex,
xetex, uptex, ......) that might be necessary to actually run a test
fileusing a certain package.

> It passes this test (loading knitr), but almost any workflow will need other
> sets of packages, depending on the R code in the Rnw document being
> processed (which cannot be known before run time).

That is fine. Maintainers cannot and should not cater to any possible
usage at all. I (putting my Debian maintainer hat on) often tell people
that with only texlive-base installed, they can compile simple TeX
documents, but nothing more. But this is it. If they want more, the need
to install texlive-*-recommended etc etc.

Best

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                               http://www.preining.info
Accelia Inc.     +    JAIST     +    TeX Live     +    Debian Developer
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