[tlbuild] Building an embedded tex/latex for a ruby gem.

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 11:18 PM, Jason Kenney wrote:
>
> Perhaps I should clarify:
>    Similar to what the ruby solr and sqlite gems do, I would like a gem that allows for the download and configuration
> of a Tex Live distribution. The idea is a rails project should have all dependencies installable from just typing 'bundle install'.
> The reason I was using this mailing list was to ask for help in finding out what binaries/source is needed to have a minimal working
> install

An installation with minimal work to create a package or a package
with the minimal size? How minimal? Try to install a minimal scheme
from TeX Live with the default installer and see what problems you
stumble upon. It hardly makes sense to discuss the issue before you
try the installer and ask more specific questions once you see how it
works. (Beware: minimal installation doesn't include LaTeX.)

So before you get any further answers it might be helpful to know:
- How many days/weeks are you willing to invest into creation of such a package?
- Is it acceptable that "gem" would simply run the default TeX Live installer?
- If not: is it acceptable to fetch precompiled binaries and if not:
how much time are users willing to wait for compilation of sources?
- How small should the package be? Is a few GB too much? If yes, how
do you plan to provide other packages that the "minimal" one doesn't
install?


> that can run from a non standard directory (ruby gems have a bin directory for instance),

You can install the binaries anywhere. But unless you plan to compile
the binaries yourself, it simplifies your life a lot if you can put
the configuration file under $BINS/../../texmf.cnf or
$BINS/../../texmf-dist/web2c/texmf.cnf where $BINS is the folder where
the binaries are. In that configuration file you can specify where to
find other files.

It all depends on how much effort you are willing to put into a
creation of your package.

> and an easy way to install this

The easiest way to install it is to run the default installation
script ./install-tl and feed it with parameters to satisfy your ruby
needs.

> when the computer could be mac or linux (I can figure out how to script the OS detection, I just need the diff between the two platforms in
> installation procedure).

If you use the default installer, there is no difference in
installation. The platform is being detected automatically and the
default binaries are pulled. If you would, say, copy the whole SVN
(see http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Master/) you just need to
include your platform from "bin", everything else from texmf-dist and
other directories stays the same.

>    The other aspect is licensing, as in what actions are permissible on my part.

Others should answer that, but the TeX Live team is going to great
extents making sure that everything non-free is excluded from the
distribution. So as long as you do something sensible with
distribution there should be no problems with licencing.

Mojca

PS: if you plan to continue the discussion, it really makes sense to
move it to another mailing list. This one is mostly meant for
requesting new rebuilds of binaries and for hunting bugs that prevent
sources from compiling.