Ubuntu – Why does asciidoc have texlive as a dependency

aptasciidoc

This is what happens when I try to install asciidoc:

$ sudo apt-get install asciidoc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  dblatex docbook-utils jadetex latex-beamer latex-xcolor libgraphite3
  libkpathsea6 libptexenc1 lmodern luatex pgf prosper ps2eps tex-gyre texlive
  texlive-base texlive-bibtex-extra texlive-binaries texlive-common
  texlive-doc-base texlive-extra-utils texlive-font-utils
  texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-recommended-doc
  texlive-generic-recommended texlive-latex-base texlive-latex-base-doc
  texlive-latex-extra texlive-latex-extra-doc texlive-latex-recommended
  texlive-latex-recommended-doc texlive-luatex texlive-math-extra
  texlive-pictures texlive-pictures-doc texlive-pstricks texlive-pstricks-doc
  tipa xmlto

As far as I understand, it is completely unnecessary for the html and docbook backends: I would only need it if I want to generate latex files.

This question is related to this question, in the sense that it is not easy to install vanilla Tex Live on a Ubuntu / Debian (this is necessary for getting up-to-date versions of Tex Live components, sometimes).

Best Answer

Try:

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install asciidoc

Package can recommend another packages, if the maintainer think many people that use it will need the second one, or it has some features that needs it.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Why does apt think it needs this extra dependency

Seems that there is some kind of "weight" system playing here:

$ aptitude why ant openjdk-7-jdk
p   ant                 Recommends ant-optional       
p   ant-optional        Suggests   libgnumail-java    
p   libgnumail-java     Suggests   libgnumail-java-doc
p   libgnumail-java-doc Recommends default-jdk-doc    
p   default-jdk-doc     Depends    openjdk-7-doc      
p   openjdk-7-doc       Suggests   openjdk-7-jdk

As you can see ant depends of openjdk-7-jdk due a complicated and intricated amounts of suggestions, recommendations and dependency, while when using openjdk-6-jdk the dependency is more direct:

$ aptitude why ant openjdk-6-jdk
p   ant           Suggests default-jdk | java-compiler | java-sdk
p   openjdk-6-jdk Provides java-sdk

Of course aptitude methods of dependency resolution, could be different of apt-get's. BTW, running a simulation of ant without openjdk-7-jdk installed don't pulled openjdk-6-jdk:

$ sudo apt-get install ant
[sudo] password for braiam: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  ant-optional
Suggested packages:
  default-jdk java-compiler java-sdk ant-gcj ant-doc liboro-java junit
  libregexp-java jython antlr libbcel-java libjdepend-java libgnumail-java
  libcommons-net-java libjsch-java javacc ant-optional-gcj
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  ant ant-optional
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 9 not upgraded.
Need to get 2,234 kB of archives.
After this operation, 3,041 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Maybe if you use the same methods as I did, you could figure out more, since I'm using Debian testing right now and repositories could have changed in the meanwhile.

Ubuntu – What advantages does markdown have over asciidoc

Markdown has some critical mass, and the grammar is smaller than that of Asciidoc.

Markdown does have the drawback that if you want something more complicated you're out of luck, or into implementation-specific syntax that may not fit well whereas Asciidoc can scale up.

There is a g+ post by Dan Allen comparing them and prefering Asciidoc.

Related Question