Fedora 18's texlive package has a problem. Actually it has at least two problems, one of which makes it our problem. The first problem is that other packages require bits of it to be installed; this is the only reason I have any texlive packages installed. The second problem is that the TexLive package maintainers have chosen to split it up into a truly absurd number of sub-packages. Many of these sub-packages are small, only a few kilobytes (some are below a kilobyte), and some of them are actually empty.

(Other fun things include multiple copies of the GPL, duplicated between various sub-packages. For some packages, the GPL text is the largest single file. Also, some of those empty packages are explicit dependencies of other packages. Why? Who knows.)

Another issue seems to be that texlive's internal dependencies keep creeping around in a way that expands the number of texlive packages installed on your machine over time. My work machine crept up to over a thousand texlive packages, amounting to a fifth of all packages installed on it, and I've seen texlive package updates require additional texlive packages.

This isn't just a problem of massive clutter and its discontents, or of stupid packaging gone absurd. Various yum operations, such as installing package updates, take an amount of time proportional to the amount of packages (no matter how small or empty the package is). Having hundreds of little texlive packages installed thus slows them down drastically; the straw that broke the camel's back on my work machine was a package update that took more than an hour because it was updating over a thousand texlive packages. This elevates texlive's absurd number of sub-packages from merely a bad idea to actively harmful (both because long package update times annoy people and because they encourage people not to update things at all).

I don't know how Fedora allowed things to reach this level of absurdity. But it is absurd and stupid. I've filed a bug about the package count (I didn't discover the other absurdities until now) but to be honest I don't expect anything to change.

(By the way, having this many texlive packages doesn't help people in the least if they want a minimal texlive installation. There are so many packages and they are so absurdly named that I defy anyone who is not deeply immersed in TexLive arcana to figure out what packages they need and what packages they don't.)

I'm sure that the TexLive packagers have some reason for doing all of this; people are rarely crazy. It's just that their reason is a bad one because it has led them into a maze of absurdities. To me this smells of a vastly over-engineered solution, perhaps one put together in the nominal name of efficiency. If so, it has backfired (as these things often do); in a quest for efficiency it has instead created great inefficiency.