[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up

[Enrico Franconi]

On 17 Nov 2006, at 01:06, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:

> People will have to rely on an alternate source for up-to-date  
> ghostscript/ImageMagick/etc, which means using a system like fink  
> or compiling your own from source and dealing with dependency  
> nightmares.

The lack of dependencies' maintenance in the i-installer is what made  
me choose fink (with its GUI, FinkCommander), and now darwinports  
(with its GUI, PortAuthority) to install libraries and binaries other  
than the TeX distribution. If you have a complex unix system, you can  
not simply upgrade/uninstall a library without checking whether this  
has been used by other stuff, which may depend on it or on a  
particular version of it. If you use your computer in several  
different ways, the i-installer may disrupt in a very subtle way your  
system. It seems to me that the i-installer is very good at its job  
for users who do not install any other library in any other way. It  
is true, though, that using fink or darwinports requires some  
exposure to cli even with their GUIs.
So, if there will be some effort to build an alternative installer  
(or unsing MacTeX) for those libraries and binaries, this has to be  
done with care; e.g., in a separate directory for the libraries seen  
only by those binaries, etc.
Maybe I'm wrong (those observations are based on the first versions  
of i-installer, so something may have been changed meanwhile), so  
please comment.
cheers
--e.
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