[tex-live] ifxetex package missing from collection-xetex

[Michael A. Peters]

On Thu, 2007-02-01 at 22:54 +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

> but has experience with MikTeX too.  I'm quite interested to know what
> people like/dislike in MikTeX/TeXLive.

Not having used MikTeX - the reason I hear it is liked so much is the
package management.

I am still fairly green with LaTeX having my first experience with the
last teTeX realease (in Fedora). When I installed the test TeXLive 2007
many of things I had been doing broke. They were primarily broken
because of updates to memoir conflicting with subfigure.sty and
glossary.sty. However, a little googling and I found that the teTeX I
had been using was very similar to TeXLive 2004. So I installed that
version and those old projects compiled again (I've fixed them all for
2007, btw - it wasn't too difficult, but I still need to tweak the look
of my glossaries some more).

That makes TeXLive very desirable to me - I can put a comment in a
project noting which version of TeXLive I wrote it in. If in six years I
need to tweak something in an old project, I don't have to port it to
tweak it - I can just use the version of TeXLive it was written in w/o
too much fuss at all. I might have to install some shared libraries if I
want to use the binaries, but most of TeXLive seems to only need glibc
which doesn't change too much in a way that breaks things. I'm guessing
though that the texmf-dist is the most important piece of it that I
would need.

That's my perspective as to why I now like TeXLive - even though
generally I prefer everything I install to be under the watch of RPM.
TeXLive though is a worthy exception to RPM management I think because
it is all self contained so it can be on a partition that doesn't get
wiped when changing to a new version of my OS.

-=-
If there was one thing I could change about TeXLive - it would be
texdoctk. I think it should respect the TEXDOCVIEW_* variables I have
set for my user for texdoc - and some of the documentation isn't
available, IE if I click on the documentation for memoir, I can get
memman.pdf but it doesn't offer me (that I saw) memmanadd.pdf which was
an important part of me figuring out how it does glossaries.

I think texdoctk might need to be re-written to use individual catalog
files instead of a big catalog file, so that it is easy for updates to
packages that add new documentation to just update their own little
catalog file. But I'm not volunteering, so I'll take what I can get.

It also would be nice if more commercial font foundries (IE Adobe, E&F,
etc.) distributed TeX support files with their commercial fonts. But
that's not up to anyone except the font foundries.