Gentoo LaTeX: Dependency Hell

There 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.