Hi John, On Oct 30, 2006, at 1:25 AM, John Owens wrote:

Howdy, I'm a frequent LaTeX user and have for the past couple of years used the very nice tetex distribution via MacPorts. Unfortunately the maintainer will no longer be maintaining it:

http://www.tug.org/tetex/

and that's a long-term problem for MacPorts, as I think it's really desirable to have a MacPorts port for a LaTeX distribution.

One option is TeX Live, currently released once a year, and is probably the best place to start:

http://www.tug.org/texlive/

Yes, TeXLive is one option but it is a _big_ project to rip apart the TeXLive distribution, build the binaries from source and repackage the TeX files into something like the texmf/ directories of teTeX. The real problem is that TeXLive is an entire parallel packaging scheme, not very compatible with MacPorts. Adapting TeXLive could be done, but it really needs someone to spend a lot of time making it work. That person won't be me in the near future; I am busy now with real work and keeping the getting all the haskell ports working with the latest compiler release.

MacTeX is another possibility, and is included in TeX Live, I guess:

http://tug.org/mactex/

There's the less frequently used XeTeX distribution:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex

Mostly I just hope that we can have a distribution that keeps reasonably current with the latest pdftex versions, and it does not appear that tetex will do so. Perhaps this has already been discussed and decided? Just wanted to bring it up if not ...

Nothing has been decided; whoever steps up and contributes a portfile is the decision maker ;-) -Greg

JDO