Adrian von Bidder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday 13 June 2005 09.41, frank wrote: > [texlive vs. teTeX] >> Let me add some comments from my point of view (Debian teTeX >> maintainer). > > Sounds like packaging texlive and trying to get it really stable would be > the thing to do, with the goal of phasing out teTeX for etch+1 > > Not becuase I don't value your work, Frank, but from what you said it sounds > like texlive is a better maintained superset of teTeX - or are there > reasons why somebody specifically would want to stick to teTeX (assuming a > transition plan etc. etc. to solve "all" Debian/packaging specific issues.)
TeX-Live exists for a couple of years now, and while it might gain some teTeX users, teTeX upstream is by no means dead. So for these users, there must be a reason to use teTeX. I don't know these reasons; but one might be that with teTeX you get a TeX system that contains all the essential stuff without much bloat. You can have the same with tex-live, by selecting and deselecting the appropriate sub-packages (binary packages when provided by Debian). But personally I find it easier to start with teTeX's choices and add some specific packages from CTAN if I really need them. I also wouldn't say that tex-live is better maintained. It's just the style that differs: A team effort with a yearly release schedule for tex-live, the work of one very experienced TeX guru for teTeX (who bases his decisions more on the development of TeX tools and programs than on the release schedule of Debian, that's why I made that remark about "releasing when he thinks it is time"). By the way, Thomas Esser and the tex-live team work closely together, and for sure he has quite some influence on them; but as long as he does not stop teTeX, I see no reason for us to stop it. One other thing is that texlive's focus is on personal computers - Windows, Mac, and i386-Linux, while teTeX is a distribution for UNIX-like operating systems. I'm not an architecture expert, but I can imagine that there might be issues in the sources that can be solved in a satisfying way _either_ for i386-Linux, Mac, and Windows, _or_ for GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, Whatever/Unixoid (all on a variety of different architectures). In this case we might be glad to have teTeX packages for all (released and however-they-are-called) architectures, not just texlive for a small subset, or alternatively a hell of patches. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
