Re: Sizes of TL distribution

Hi Frank,

On Sat, 2026-01-17 at 18:19 +0100, Frank Mittelbach wrote:
> 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.

The default setting is to install the documentation; users need to
manually and explicitly choose to not install it. The "recommendation"
here was just my personal recommendation, nothing official in any way.

> 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

The alternative is to more than double the size of an installation (4GB
without docs, 9GB with docs) for something that the *vast* majority of
users will never use. I'm not saying that most never users never read
the documentation (although this is probably true...), just that they're
more likely to Google "package <package-name> documentation" or go to
the package's CTAN page than to mess around with funky terminal
commands.

> because then people can't do texdoc ... and you can't direct them to it.

Sure you can:

    https://github.com/TeX-Live/texdoc/pull/79

Testing this on a fresh installation gives me

    $ texdoc source2e
    You don't appear to have any local documentation installed.

    There may be online documentation available for "source2e" at
        https://texdoc.org/serve/source2e/0
    This documentation may be for a different version than you have installed.

    Would you like to search online? (y/N)

and pressing "y" opens my browser up to a copy of source2e.pdf. Now,
this won't work offline, but considering that most users just use
Overleaf, and rely on TeX.SE and LLMs for TeX help, this isn't much of
an issue. (And users who know that they will be frequently offline will
just install the documentation anyways.)

> I think the biggest problem is that CTAN hsots far too many stuff
> accumulated over the years.

Ok, so are you volunteering to tell CTAN which packages they should
delete? :) But realistically, I don't think that we could possibly
remove anything that's been updated in the past 10 years, but all the
old packages from the 90s have tiny file sizes, so I don't think that
removing obsolete packages from CTAN would make a meaningful impact on
installation sizes.

The biggest issues are fonts and random university thesis classes, but
people use all of those, so we can't get rid of them.

> I think it should be possible to make a
> medium scheme that doing the trick,

The schemes are essentially just random ad-hoc collections of packages
(Karl, please correct me if I'm wrong here), but after writing TLC3,
scraping arXiv for the accessibility package status table, and dealing
with various user support requests over the years, you probably have a
much better idea of which packages are commonly used than we do. So if
you're willing to give us a list of packages, we'll gladly update one of
the schemes or create a new one to contain only those packages.

But at the end of the day, we'll still have the problem of users needing
random university thesis classes, and since very few package authors
provide dependency information, users can't just run "tlmgr install
university-thesis"; they'll instead need to trace down the entire
dependency chain and install everything manually.

> 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.

Sure, if you're committed to using LaTeX, it's really not much of an
issue---most of us on this list have multiple versions of TL installed,
totalling to a few dozen gigabytes. But if a new user is deciding on
which typesetting system to use for the first time, then Overleaf takes
0 MB of disk space, Typst takes <100 MB, MiKTeX takes ~500 MB, and the
ConTeXt Standalone Distribution takes ~600 MB. To a new user, all these
options appear equivalent, so then why would they want to pick the 9 GB
option?

Thanks,
-- Max