# The endless Drama with FreeBSD TeX-Ports



## getopt (Oct 9, 2017)

The TeX collection is huge you can end up with 3-5GB if you want it in full. What you really need may be as little as some few hundred MB, the rest you will never miss. It is a waste of time and resources downloading and storing all of it. FreeBSD-TeX is still locked in with the full TeX-Version 2015.

But that waste happens all the time in FreeBSD if you want to build something depending on TeX even if it is only a little utility. See what /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.tex.mk defines. You may use all strong words when you look at it, but writing here I call it just highly unprofessional. Another big problem is, that the installation directories are not compatible with the original Tex Installation which makes it very hard for maintaining the collection, practically impossible.

TeX has an installer with that one can download whatever is needed, update and customize. You can get it there:

http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz

But this is not compatible to the existing FreeBSD TeX ports/packages. The FreeBSD TeX ports should can use the _original TeX-tree_ without any fiddling by the user. That CTAN installer should be available as a FreeBSD port with a reasonable minimal recommended configuration  on which other TeX-ports could depend on. No more problems with all Tex-ports when TeX Live changes and users can customize easy on what they really need.

TeX-Users (are there still some?) please wake up the TeX port maintainers! 
There exist old PRs but they are just there, no works ever happened on that. 

FreeBSD is something you better avoid if you need to work with TeX and that is really bad because you end in struggling problems and not in your intended writing tasks. Let's change that!


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