TeX Live and MacTeX ⇒ Linux - remove XTerm without breaking the whole texlive-full package

[Allshevski]

Hi, I'm new to this forum and to LaTeX in general. After writing a small drama piece in this text field and my internet disconnected leading to loss of work, I'll keep things short.

So the issue is, I installed texlive-full on KDE neon (ubuntu base) and it came with xterm and vprerex packages. I don't want them, but when I run

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$ sudo apt remove xterm

it tells me that vprerex depends on xterm and will also be removed, which is fine, but then it tells me that this will also remove the texlive-full package, orphaning the rest of the included packages, which then go on the autoremove list, which is not desirable, as I still want to have the LaTeX packages, only without the xterm, uxterm, prerex and vprerex.

How can I fix this? Is there a "LaTeX essentials" package that would just include all the necessary libraries and maybe a nice compiler without all the software that will double up on my existing terminal and viewer? Is there a way to remove xterm from texlive-full but for it not to give up on the rest of the packages?

[migf]

Hi,

Yes, the prerex and vprerex packages are part of Tikz that is required by texlive and it is prerex that depends on xterm.
You could solve your problem by building your own meta-package as explained for instance here https://askubuntu.com/questions/33413/, by finding the dependencies of texlive-full running

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apt-cache depends texlive-full

and selecting those you want to keep.
The problem is that if you just omit the prerex dependency in that list, you will have a new dependency error when one
of the other packages in that list tries (directly or not) to install vprerex. So you have to find out all the packages that
are related to this and most probably you will find out that you need one of them.
My suggestion is that you just let this as is: the amount of disk space used by xterm is not that large and if you just ignore that it exists, it will not cause any problem.

Hope this helps!