[OS X TeX] dvipdfmx binary missing in BasicTeX

[Michael Ummels]

Hi all,

I recently installed BasicTeX
(http://tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html) on my Mac. Everything went
smooth, but when I tried to open a DVI file with Skim, it said it
could not open this file. After some googling, I found out that Skim
relies on dvipdfmx to convert DVI files to PDF files. Hence, I tried
to install that package using tlmgr only to find out that it is
already installed; however, the binary dvipdfmx was missing. To
resolve this problem, I had to reinstall dvipdfmx using 'tlmgr install
--reinstall dvipdfmx'.

After reading the documentation of BasicTeX, I found out that several
files and directories, including the binaries for dvipdfm and
dvipdfmx, are purposefully removed by a post-install script of
BasicTeX. I find it troublesome that BasicTeX interferes with the
TeXLive installation in such a way. The result is that two packages
(dvipdfm and dvipdfmx), which are marked as being installed in tlmgr,
are effectively broken and need to be reinstalled to get them working.

I understand that the creators of BasicTeX aimed at a small footprint
of the installation, but I do not think that including these two
binaries would affect the footprint by a significant amount. IMHO,
since dvipdfm and dvipdfmx are contained in the 'basic' collection of
TeXLive, even a minimal installation should ship them.

Thanks,
Michael