MacTeX Install - Final Data Point

Richard Koch richardmoncriefkoch at icloud.com
Sun Feb 23 04:18:07 CET 2025


I installed on an Arm machine, also running Big Sur. This machine
was the first Arm machine introduced by Apple; I use it to build
Arm binaries.

Installation was considerably faster because --- surprise, surprise ---
Arm is a lot faster than Intel. Runing the scripts took only 3 minutes.
Everything compiled, and typesetting worked just fine.

---------

Note that I convert the build system from 2024 to 2025 in December.
Conversion is literally a search for 24 and replace with 25. So
the same build scripts, etc., are used this year as last year.

However, while I compile binaries on older systems,
I actually build install packages on the latest macOS, so
Sequoia. Therefore if Apple is updating packagebuilder, then
in 2025 we use the updated versions. For quite some time they
left the software alone. But it would not be surprising if 
an engineer said "most Macs are Arm, so let's optimize things
for Arm."

This doesn't explain Adam Maxwell's experience, but I suspect
a bad download in that case. Notice that I compute md5 sums
on my machine and on tug and compare after uploading.
These md5 sums are listed in the pretest right alongside
the install packages.

Dick


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