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

[simon at getthingsfixed.co.uk]

On Monday 22 October 2012 12:25:51 Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> 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...

The obesity of texlive isn't too bad, even on the RPi, cos of Moores Law. By 
the time we were to finish addressing the issue the then current disk space 
will easily accommodate the stuff about which we were whinging earlier.

I started my RPi with 4GB SD, decided it wasn't enough, so went for 16.

> 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).

For those of us with underendowed disks: is there an obvious solution? Like 
can the texlive packages be organised to exclude more of the documentation? 
Possible caching link to DVD/local www for when you do want it?

> 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.

I know what you're thinking. "Did he use six packages or only five?" Well, to 
tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself.  ...

Simon
-- 
Get Things Fixed