The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by guywithabike on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @02:24AM (#3264519)

"Beautiful" has nothing to do with whether it's crippled or not. In any case, how is a 4GB executable + several-second runtime for trivial documents Apple's fault? Is the iPad crippled because it can't run a crappy cross-compiled version of OpenOffice with a PS/2 mouse?

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by kleiba on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @05:56AM (#3264992)

I guess the argument is that it's apple's "fault" because the restrictions of the platform require the whole package to be bundled as a single binary, instead of allowing a more modular distribution mechanism. Most of the contents in the 4G are extension packages.

But I am not sure if "fault" is an appropriate term here anyway, we're simply observing two different approaches to software bundling that happen to be incompatible.

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by jawaddeo on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @08:31AM (#3265422)

The restrictions are what they are, but TeX doesn't help at all by being large with an internal (circular!) dependency tree that would (should) get you fired in a flash from a commercial software house.

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Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad by kleiba on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @06:49PM (#3272339)

Apart from the fact that trees cannot be circular ;-) LaTeX installations work like a charm for other forms of distributions. I think it's really just a clash of philosophies here.

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