[tex-live] "why is tex live so big"

[Robin Fairbairns]

a speaker at the uk tug meeting on saturday (talking about tex-on-
raspberry-pi[*]) had a moan about the size of tex live.  not
unreasonable in that context, really...

thinking about it on my way home (a slow journey) i decided it might be
useful to provide an answer in the faq (ignoring the fact that no newbie
is likely to look at the faq, but at least it would be a useful link to
give to people who were having trouble).

in the discussion in the meeting, several "obvious" things were touched
on: don't retain the package files, don't keep a source tree.  some
suggested not to retain the documentation, though that (imho) is a
dangerous.

does anyone here have any other tricks.  for example, is the
auto-downloader texliveonfly a reasonable recommendation, in the sense
of "install a minimal tl, and populate it as you go along"?  (the
corresponding thing is quite a good answer for miktex users, but i've no
experience of texliveonfly.)

robin
who may one day soon be releasing a new faq with a new meaningless
version number

[*] cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi