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by dubya 5192 days ago
I haven't looked into why TeX distributions (looking at you TeX Live) are so big these days, because it mostly doesn't matter. I suspect that I could take almost everything I write today and typeset it on your Amiga without too many problems.
1 comments
dfc 5192 days ago
You don't know why TL is so big? Because it includes everything on CTAN that is compatible with DFSG. CTAN is an enormous archive containing numerous packages that do the same thing slightly different. How many packages are there like booktabs/tabulary/tabularyx/longtable etc? How many enumitem like packages are there?

What is so confusing?

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dubya 5191 days ago
"TL is big because it includes everything possible" isn't the confusing part, what's confusing is why it has doubled in size every couple of years. Is that all from CTAN? The other why could be: why do they include everything when they have a perfectly good package manager? I don't know if TL will do on-demand loading, but MikTeX on Windows did so years ago, so it should be possible.
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dfc 5191 days ago
The documentation for the different languages is huge. Plus all of the architectures. When I install I only install english/linux-x86-64 and its not that big. Plus fonts do not compress that well..
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