[dpwm]

> If you create a tarball of TinyTeX on macOS or Ubuntu, it will be only 50MB

This is excellent and has accelerated my long-term dream: an up-to-date TeX distribution that can live in my home directory in an lz4 (hc) squashfs archive (72M) and be mounted on an as-needed basis.

UPDATE: As I had hoped, TinyTeX works in an lz4 squashfs. On my system it's actually a tiny bit faster under squashfs than from my ext4 home partition.

[bscphil]

What is the advantage of having LaTeX in a squashfs if it's taking up space on your home partition anyway? I can't think of any reason to do this unless you want your LaTeX to be read-only for some reason.

[dpwm]

Yeah, I don't know why I said in home directory and just mounted when I need it. Might as well be mounted all the time and system-wide. It just all came out in some kind of rambling excited nonsense.

The TeX Live packages are by far the largest on my system. Last time I looked there were loads of very small and moderately compressible files that caused space usage to be exaggerated.

The only time the non-user TeX directories need to be writeable is to update or install new packages, so it doesn't matter if it it's read only most of the time.