Question

1

how to avoid heavy dependency

rated 0 times [ 1] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 571 / 3 Years ago, sat, september 11, 2021, 3:13:50

I have a limited SSD hard drive. So I cannot install any software on my Ubuntu.

I just tried to install a very simple application: texmaker

sudo apt-get install texmaker

[sudo] password for arash: 

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree       

Reading state information... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

  asymptote asymptote-doc ibus-qt4 libgsl0ldbl libibus-qt1 libpoppler-qt4-4

  preview-latex-style psutils texlive-lang-english texlive-latex-extra

  texlive-latex-extra-doc texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc texmaker-data

Suggested packages:

  gv xpdf gsl-ref-psdoc gsl-doc-pdf gsl-doc-info gsl-ref-html python-pygments

  dot2tex libtcltk-ruby texlive-lang-all

The following NEW packages will be installed:

  asymptote asymptote-doc ibus-qt4 libgsl0ldbl libibus-qt1 libpoppler-qt4-4

  preview-latex-style psutils texlive-lang-english texlive-latex-extra

  texlive-latex-extra-doc texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc texmaker

  texmaker-data

0 to upgrade, 15 to newly install, 0 to remove and 6 not to upgrade.

Need to get 454 MB of archives.

After this operation, 665 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n

Abort.

Why such huge dependency? Are they all really necessary? Any way to have the software with lighter installation?

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mance

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answered 3 Years ago tisglitter · Accepted Answer

Texmaker is a particular case. Whomever packaged it, correctly assumed it will be used to create and compile LaTeX documents, and thus marked TexLive as a recommended dependency. TexLive is a bit of a monster, the complete package suite is over 1 Gb; Texmaker marks the most common modules, that should cover most users needs.

You can instruct apt to install Texmaker without the recommended packages:

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install texmaker

Now you should have Texmaker installed, but are unable to compile LaTeX documents; for that you must install TexLive. Fortunately, the texlive package marks few dependencies:

sudo apt-get install texlive

This gets you a minimal compiler, many common LaTeX modules and fonts will not be available.

If you need a LaTeX module that is not present in base packages, then the best alternative is to manually install TexLive from CTAN and use tlmgr to cherry pick the modules you need.