Comment 13 for bug 712521

@ preining

Perhaps I'm dumb, but:

> Guess how many complains we (now I am Debian maintainer) get about the size? If I could package all of TL in one package that would be much easier ...

This wasn't what I meant. I meant to package just one bit of TL, the installer, into it, and make it pretend to provide all the TL dependencies. This is essentially what we do when we make a manual install anyway.

>you seem to have no idea what TeX and friends is about!?

No, unfortunately I do not.

> And something else, tlmgr is now existing since 2007, I wrote it.

I meant that it was not included until Tex Live 2010... I could be wrong about that also? But thank you for the great program!

> Yes, lack of manpower. So why don't you step forward and contribute?

There is, unfortunately, a simple answer to this. Anyone who is saavy enough to help with the packaging would have already made a manual install (probably with a fake deb pretending to provide all the TL packages). Even a newbie like me is able to do so. My point here is simply: I think the work/itch scratching ratio for the canonical solution may just be too high. You should start to consider radical solutions, like maybe splitting between:

1) "Fake" full installation that would benefit the individual user (it's basically what we do now anyway, and we ought to get rid of the learning curve for any new people).
2) "Real" full installation (if I read right, your job would be much easier if you really could stick it all in one package) for those who need the automatically generated stuff.