[tex-live] teTeX: no next release

Peter Flynn peter at silmaril.ie
Mon May 29 22:12:37 CEST 2006


Frank Küster wrote:
> Just to make that clear:  I answered to Michael's original mail about a
> rpm repository for *teTeX*, which I see no big value in now that teTeX
> won't get a further release.  rpm's for TeXLive are a completely
> different thing; as much as I am happy that we now have Debian packages
> for TeXLive, I also support to create rpms.

I'm sorry, I should have trimmed that quote.

> I always thought that the Debian teTeX packages were the outdated ones

I can't speak to the Debian ones as I never used them. Perhaps they were
the same as the RH ones, repackaged.

> (and the reason was in most cases: an unfortunate coincidence of the
> long teTeX release cycles with the long Debian release cycles).  I don't
> know how teTeX-rpms were handled for RH and FC.
> 
> However, even TeXLive has a yearly release cycle; so if a distribution
> has a release twice a year, one of them might well contain a TeXlive
> which is nearly a year old.

I don't think that would be so bad a problem. There were occasions when
the tetex RPMs were distributed on the RH CDs with stuff that was three
years out of date (I think I'm remembering it right, it should be in ctt
somewhere: I queried it and SPQR confirmed it; I think it was the pdftex
binary on that occasion).

> I must say that I did not use TeXLive at all until recently, so I don't
> know about this.  But I'm surprised here, since the infrastructure and
> the underlying kpathsea is the same as in teTeX.  And there, it was
> never a problem:  If the file placement in the main rpms changes, some
> variable in texmf.cnf is changed, but the locations for the
> machine-specific or per-user directories didn't change at all.

I'm sorry, I didn't make this clearer. Small changes within the TDS are
to be expected as it matures. I'm talking about the root. One year it
was /usr/local/TeX-Live or something, one year it was /usr/TeX, now it's
/usr/local/texlive/2005. Stand still, you bugger, I can't aim if you
keep moving :-)

> I don't understand which "political arguments in the Debian field" you
> are talking about, can you elaborate?

Apparently there is some dispute among Debianites as to whether TeX is
truly free or not, and therefore whether it should even be included in
their core distro.

///Peter


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