[tex-live] tl2rpm: TeX Live 2008 packages to rpm converter

Victor Ivrii vivrii at gmail.com
Mon Aug 25 00:43:34 CEST 2008


On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> wrote:
>    I hope most of the TeX users will figure out how to install a missing
>    part even though scheme-basic would be the default.
>
> FWIW, from talking to mathematicians at conferences, etc., my experience
> is that most TeX *users*, as opposed to developers, just install the
> system and that's the end of it (as Robin has reported at his site,
> too).  They don't want to mess around with TeX.  They want to write
> their papers.

Majority of my esteemed colleagues never update things and happily
continue with tetex 3.0. Actually when our Dept TeX was updated to
thetex 3.0 some were screaming "Bloody murder" because (if I remember
correctly) fiverm became undefined. So, there is no problem: they
neither installed TL 2007, nor will install TL2008, 2009, ....

However, they are really upset when paper they receive from other
colleagues cannot be processed because some packages/documentclasses
cannot be found or are too old. Therefore even if particular user does
not go beyond latex209 he/she may sometimes need a bleeding edge and
complete distribution. In this sense "basic" distribution can work for
advanced users who can add things later but it will fail badly for
majority of users who will just complain . Since hard disk space is
not a problem I don't think that basic installation is a good idea.

>
> Of course I realize that such TeX users are a tiny fraction of Fedora
> users.  So I don't know how to solve it.  Can the Fedora installer have
> texlive-scheme-full for some and texlive-scheme-basic for others?

>
> Also, I continue to think that texlive-scheme-basic is too basic.  Even
> just for processing documentation.  If the documentation uses *any*
> non-core LaTeX styles, scheme-basic will not be enough.  How about
> scheme-medium or scheme-tetex
>
> karl
>


Victor
--
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii


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