Gentoo LaTeX: Dependency Hell
Nov. 27th, 2010 09:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThere is no more incompetent group of boobs over at Gentoo than the LaTeX team, the team that provides the high-end typesetting software for book and magazine production. Every year, they put out a functional, working package of LaTeX that gets the job done, and every year they re-arrange the furniture, this year going so far as to get a first-tier folder in the apps manager, which they didn't have last year.
Which means every year, if I want to do advanced typesetting, I spend all day with the following: "Try to update LaTeX." Computer comes back with, "I can't, package A is marked unstable." (Everything in the LaTeX package is marked "unstable." This doesn't mean unuseable, it just means the Gentoo team doesn't have a big enough test suite to confirm it works for everyone.) I say, "Fine, package A is now marked available. Try again." Wait a while. Computer comes back, "I can't, package B is marked unavailable."
Lather, rinse, repeat. And it's not like LaTeX didn't have these packages last year; it's just that they've all been re-arranged, so the permissions markers have to be updated, by hand, one at a f'ing time, until the permissions override file has forty or fifty of these damned things. I'm up to 25 as of this morning. What a pain in the neck.
Which means every year, if I want to do advanced typesetting, I spend all day with the following: "Try to update LaTeX." Computer comes back with, "I can't, package A is marked unstable." (Everything in the LaTeX package is marked "unstable." This doesn't mean unuseable, it just means the Gentoo team doesn't have a big enough test suite to confirm it works for everyone.) I say, "Fine, package A is now marked available. Try again." Wait a while. Computer comes back, "I can't, package B is marked unavailable."
Lather, rinse, repeat. And it's not like LaTeX didn't have these packages last year; it's just that they've all been re-arranged, so the permissions markers have to be updated, by hand, one at a f'ing time, until the permissions override file has forty or fifty of these damned things. I'm up to 25 as of this morning. What a pain in the neck.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 09:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 05:44 pm (UTC)I've been futzing a little bit with something called Arch lately. It's sort of a synthesis between Debian (which has gotten piggy and takes forever between releases) and Gentoo (which seemingly can't package-manage its way out of a wet paper bag).... precompiled packages but with an emphasis on light and KISS....
no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 05:50 pm (UTC)Gentoo will tell you exactly what's wrong, one step at a time, until it can correct things at least. Directly, error messages and obstacles are clearly layed out when they come up, without requiring X or external websites or similair to make things comprehendable.
Yes, they have been lacking a proper oversight on their equivilant of the dewey-decimal system, bumping some things to first-tier categories lately, and have a poor/non-existant system to handle such transitions right now because historically they simply didn't happen very often. But I still trust Gentoo to do what I tell it, and not an inch more, more than any other distro. I appreciate that as a paranoid security geek because it means I don't end up installing anything I didn't ask for, not even some esoteric graphics library for a file-format I've never even seen in the last decade or will again. Explicit whitelisting I vastly prefer to blacklisting in that regard.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-27 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 03:11 am (UTC)