[R] Installing texlive dependencies

[Marc Schwartz]

On Apr 18, 2012, at 6:31 AM, Petar Milin wrote:

> Hello ALL!
> I am running Fedora 16 x86_64. Due to some dubious problems with the
> TeXLive (2007, which is a default), I removed it. That removed R as
> well, and some other dependent packages. Then, I installed TeXLive 2011
> from CTAN. However, when I wanted to install R, from Fedora's
> repositories, it asks for some TeX dependencies (for example,
> tex-preview, texinfo-tex, texlive, texlive-dvips etc.).
> I know that new TeX is installed in other place
> (/usr/local/texlive/2011/), than the old, default, Tex 2007
> (/usr/share/texmf/). But, I defined PATH properly:
> PATH=/usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86-64-linux:$PATH
> So, I wonder why R asks for those TeX-packages? Can I tell it where to
> look?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> PM


A few thoughts:

1. Subscribe to and re-post your query to R-SIG-Fedora:

  https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-fedora

That list focuses on R and Fedora and the Fedora package maintainers subscribe to that list, so you will hopefully gain their attention.


2. It would seem that Fedora TeX support is in a bit of a sorry state at the moment, based upon a search this morning. There are various dynamics that seem to be common in discussions, mostly leading to suggestions that you do as you have done, which is to install TeXLive from upstream. Those discussions do not consider dependency issues for specific apps of course. There is a transitional TeXLive 2011 repo available here:

  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/TeXLive

but comments I found are not very supportive (in some cases, directly critical) of using that approach. It would seem that there are/were plans afoot to make TeXLive 2011 part of F17, which is due to be released in about a month. However, given some of the comments that I have seen, that is far from certain. Indeed, a check of the current F17 build repo (Koji), suggests that TeXLive 2007 is still present for F17 and even F18:

  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=5402

which, given the pending release timeline, does not provide any comfort at all, that Fedora will be updating TeXLive in the near future.


3. Since the dependencies for the R RPM are hard coded, you may find yourself creating a problem in having removed the older version of TeXLive. One suggestion that I found was rather than removing TeXLive 2007, leave it in place, install 2011 from upstream as you have done and modify your $PATH to point to 2011 so that version is picked up when you need to use TeX, rather than the 2007 version.


Regards,

Marc Schwartz