[XeTeX] stupid question: Simple TeX Installation tool for Mac OS X available?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 6/6/06, Hans-Michael Stahl wrote:
> While trying to update to the latest version of xetex, I managed to
> completely damage my once working TeX installation with the geek-tool
> "i-installer" :-(  After that, I dumped more than 700 MByte of strange
> files under /usr/local/tetex into my wastebasket ...(what is all that -
> I remember that I successfully used latex on an OS/2 System with a huge
> 80 Mbyte disk many years ago and most of the 80 Mbyte was for me and not
> for the TeX system).

I don't have a Mac, but TeX today means:

- lots of different fonts (only Latin Modern takes 10 MB zipped,
needless to speak about CM super; CMR came mostly as plain text files
which were compiled on the fly when running TeX)
- lots of different programs (pdfTeX, XeTeX, Omega & Aleph if they
were installed, dvips, dvipdfm[x], many font and conversion tools,
...)
- lots of documentation in PDF (even if you didn't install hundred
megabytes of ConTeXt documentation)
- lots of LaTeX packages (PSTricks geo data is an example of a package
that takes several dozens megabytes of space if installed)

I remember running my first LaTeX distribution from a single 1.44 MB
floppy disk ;)

It's about a better quality and about different needs (and longer time
that users had to develop new packages and write docs). So it's up to
distribution maintainers how to package the stuff, so that it will
still be easy to use, reasonably small and still as complete as
possible. Now that disk size and speed are not that problematic any
more, you'll hardly find a lightweight and fast distribution.

Sorry, it's not really a solution to your question, just an excuse.

Mojca