On 05/16/2018 12:54 PM, Pavel Sanda wrote: > Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote: >> Am Mittwoch, den 16.05.2018, 10:09 -0400 schrieb Richard Kimberly Heck: >>> The issue is that the basic MiKTeX install gives one very little. Not >>> enough even to compile the Introduction, largely due to font metric >>> files. >>> >>>> What install choices we have with TeXLive? Bundling 4gb of data is >>>> not an >>>> option, but there might be small installer which can be conditioned >>>> on base >>>> installation, without docs and we would be suddenly in the realm of >>>> 50-200mb. >> TeXLive provides a variety of "schemes": >> https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-250003.2.2 > I looked at the page, but it was not clear to me if the "scheme" is > configurable by us, ie. launching installer with preselected > lyx-friendly scheme is possible. What seems related is the "profile" > commandline switch.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of issues. One is what (if anything) we install, and the other is what happens after that. I think the "auto-install packages" feature of MiKTeX is great for people who don't want to get their hands too dirty, and Uwe was always right that we should try our best to help those folks. The problem, to my mind, is how this interacts with configure.py: Because of how we test for packages, I think, when we configure the first time, MiKTeX installs everything we test for. Which takes forever, and really doesn't make that much sense. (Actually, there's a list of packages to install in Packages.txt that's used to tell MiKTeX to install a bunch of stuff before we configure, but what it does is install everything that configure.py would install.) Maybe an option, then, would be to limit this list to stuff that is needed for e.g. compiling the documentation, and figure out some way to avoid installing everything on configuration. While we're at this, it occurred to me that maybe a "devel" build would be useful, too, that we could direct users to if they're having problems, and we need more debugging info. Riki
