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

[Zdenek Wagner]

2012/10/22 Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk>:
> 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...
>
There were several attempts to make installed TeX Live smaller. I do
not remember the exact results of my analysis but I found that the
size can only be reduced by not installing the documentation. All
binaries, scripts, style files, fonts etc are small, only the
documentation tree is large. You can easily try "du" if you have
scheme-full installed. If someone does not have enough space on a disk
but fast internet connection, it may be useful not to install
documentation but view it on the web.

> 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



-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz