Re: Sizes of TL distribution

I haven't check what "without documentation means" but if it means what 
the English says then this is more or less in violation of the LPPL 
which mandates that you should not distribute without documentation. Now 
one can argue that this is a user choice and equiv of having the 
documentation and then deleting it, but it isn't really, if it is a 
recommendation.

And I think it is a very bad recommendation and leads to even more 
nonsense questions being asked to developers and on stack exchange etc 
because then people can't do texdoc ... and you can't direct them to it.

I think the biggest problem is that CTAN hsots far too many stuff 
accumulated over the years. I think it should be possible to make a 
medium scheme that doing the trick, and 3gb is not that bad. And even 9 
is not really that much of a problem these days. I have a lot of 
software that take up several gbs.

frank



Am 17.01.26 um 17:48 schrieb Max Chernoff via tex-live:
> Hi Peter,
> 
> On Sat, 2026-01-17 at 14:43 +0000, Peter Flynn wrote:
>> Is there a list on the tug.org site of the installed sizes of the
>> various TL install schemes (eg those in 3.2.2 of the install doc)?  I
>> get occasional queries from users wanting to know if they need the whole
>> thing,
> 
> No, but when you run the install-tl script
> 
>      https://tug.org/texlive/quickinstall.html
> 
> it lists the disk space used for each option. Running some tests right now:
> 
>      full scheme            [doc+src]: 9319 MB
>      full scheme            [doc]:     8872 MB
>      full scheme            [-]:       4312 MB
>      medium scheme          [doc+src]: 2375 MB
>      medium scheme          [-]:        813 MB
>      small scheme           [-]:        210 MB
>      basic scheme           [-]:        116 MB
>      minimal scheme         [-]:         49 MB
>      infrastructure scheme  [-]:          2 MB
>      book publishing scheme [-]:        168 MB
>      ConTeXt scheme         [doc+src]:  871 MB
>      ConTeXt scheme         [doc]:      848 MB
>      ConTeXt scheme         [-]:        511 MB
> 
> I don't have the patience to try every possible option, but hopefully
> this is enough to give you an idea.
> 
> The "medium scheme" without documentation and source is probably the
> smallest scheme that's useful to a non-expert user, but even then,
> you'll probably still need to manually install a few packages. The
> "infrastructure-only scheme" can also work fairly well if you're willing
> to manually install every single package/font/engine that you use, but
> this is definitely an option for advanced users only. I'm also a pretty
> big fan of the "ConTeXt scheme", but I suspect that that won't be very
> useful for most users :).
> 
> For a beginner, the "full scheme" without documentation and source would
> be my default recommendation. It takes up an irritatingly-large amount
> of space, but hard drives are big enough these days that it shouldn't
> cause any real problems, and getting constant "file not found" errors is
> not very much fun for a beginner.
> 
>> and does tlmgr auto-install missing packages during LaTeX
>> execution
> 
> No, it does not. MiKTeX has this feature though, so if that's an
> important feature for these users, then they can install that instead.
> (This is a TeX Live list, so we're obviously biased in favour of TL, but
> MiKTeX is a perfectly fine distribution, and this is definitely its
> biggest advantage over TL, so I have no problem recommending it in this
> case).
> 
> Thanks,
> -- Max
>