2011/10/19 Chris Travers <chris.trav...@gmail.com>: > On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:20 AM, Ulrike Fischer <ne...@nililand.de> wrote: >> Am Wed, 19 Oct 2011 05:59:16 -0700 schrieb Chris Travers: >> >>> This matches my needs very well. If my clients are running accounting >>> systems, the last thing I want is an upgrade of TexLive to break their >>> ability to generate invoices. >> >> Normally you get more problems if you can't update ;-) > > You get more problems with things suddenly and unexpectedly breaking > if you don't change them? On what theory? > > At least if you don't include deliberate breakage of programs over a > certain age...... > >> >>> If there are bugs in older versions, I can work around those bugs, >>> but the problem of getting a document that will only render with >>> one version or another is not acceptable to my application. >> >> Then you shouldn't rely on an external TeXLive installation. You >> have absolutly no control on the status of the TeXLive installations >> of your users. You don't know if the fedora user installed the >> fedora-TeXLive or the newest shapshot from the svn. >> >> You also have no control about the package versions installed by the >> users. fontspec e.g. can be an old version, the current version on >> CTAN or the unstable version from Github. > > I think you may misunderstand how this works. > > We have some (relatively basic) demo templates. They are tested on > TeXLive 2007 and 2009 at present and known to render properly. They > don't use a whole lot of packages (I think mostly longtable, geometry, > and a few others). These are designed to give people a sense of what > they can do but not necessarily provide exactly what they need. > > The client then can contract with me or others to write templates in > the environment of their choice. That may be TeTeX (RHEL 5), TexLive > 2007 (RHEL 6 and friends), TexLive (Debian Stable and friends), it > could be a shiney new TexLive. It could be MikTeX. It could be > whatever. These documents are then tested on these environments and > verified to work reliably and predictably. > > The software then plugs text into the templates and runs them. These > then run reliably as long as nothing changes. > > If someone is going to upgrade TexLive, the templates have to be > tested again, against the new version. That usually means a staging > server is updated first, the templates tested, and then the update > rolled out to production when it is verified not to cause problems. > This is a very slow, deliberate process, as it should be. > I have documents as old as 18 years that still render almost without problems. The problem is that they rely on proprietary fonts and emTeX in OS/2 required them in a different directory than TL in TeX Live. It even does not matter that the documents are prepared in CP852 and now my locale is UTF-8, I can still work in CP852. It's because the documents rely on my own macros and packages that are backward compatible.
> Best Wishes, > Chris Travers > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
