[tex-live] TeX Live 2004 final vs development

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Tue Nov 30 15:10:10 CET 2004


Hi Tigran,

    So, I am asking TeX Live experts --- are there any such things practiced 
    here? I.e. could it be that the final official iso is much faster than a 
    development snapshot taken almost immediately before because of such 
    "debug code" being disabled?

No, we don't do anything like that.  The binaries in the release are
exactly the ones you built.

Perhaps your friend's installation is much faster simply because he did
it from scratch or something, and the ls-R files are getting built now?
Or maybe it's a matter of the compilers being better?  Or if he's on
x86_64, maybe your binaries are a lot faster than the generic i386-linux
ones?  Just wild guesses ...

However, I still advise upgrading to the final release, not for the sake
of the binaries, since they are unchanged, but because there were
numerous small fixes to packages and documentation since then.  It's
unlikely that the inconsistency would ever cause trouble, but it could
save you some time in the unlikely event ...

Cheers,
k



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