How to keep a dependency from [continually] appearing in setup

[Ryan Johnson]

On 02/08/2012 9:18 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 8/2/2012 5:14 AM, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
>> Ken Brown wrote:
>>> On 8/1/2012 10:18 AM, Ryan Johnson wrote:
>>>> It can be argued that emacs-auctex should not pull in texlive. Most
>>>> users installing emacs-auctex will already have some flavor of tex in
>>>> place, and not necessarily the cygwin one (like the OP, or perhaps a
>>>> MikTex user). Plus, the error message is pretty intuitive and the
>>>> solution very simple, if latex is not there: "latex: no such command"
>>>> ==> "maybe I should install latex." Therefore, the expected aggregate
>>>
>>> There's more to it than that.  emacs-auctex installs stuff needed for
>>> its preview feature in /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/preview/. This won't
>>> be found by native texlive or by MikTeX.
>>>
>>>> frustration of users who installed auctex without latex available 
>>>> would
>>>> likely be far lower than the aggregate frustration of users wanting to
>>>> install auctex and getting saddled with an unwanted redundant texlive
>>>> distribution (for which there is no easy solution).
>>>
>>> Why is this so frustrating?  It doesn't do any harm (except waste a
>>> small amount of disk space) to install Cygwin's texlive in parallel 
>>> with
>>> native texlive.  Just make sure the bin directory of the latter 
>>> precedes
>>> /usr/bin in PATH.  I myself have both installed, since I sometimes find
>>> it useful for testing purposes to be able to switch from one to the
>>> other (by temporarily changing PATH).
>>
>> I'd draw a parallel between the emacs-auctex's dependency on latex 
>> and libX11's
>> dependency on xorg-server: while xorg-server is certainly the 
>> preferred X
>> server for Cygwin, it's not the only option[0].
>>
>> [0]: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2012-02/msg00602.html
>
> The situations aren't parallel.  Cygwin's libX11 will work with X 
> servers other than xorg-server.  But Cygwin's emacs-auctex, as I 
> explained above, will not work OOTB with tex installations other than 
> Cygwin's texlive.  The preview feature will be broken.
>
> Users who prefer a different tex installation and want to use auctex 
> should build and install auctex themselves.  During installation, 
> auctex will find the appropriate texmf tree and put its preview files 
> there.
Fair enough. I was just throwing the idea out there in case it made 
sense to the people who know what's going on. Sound like it doesn't make 
sense to remove that dependency.

Ryan


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