[OS X TeX] 64-bit binaries in TeXLive 2010

[Adam M. Goldstein]

On Dec 4, 2009, at 10:54 PM, David Watson wrote:

> On Dec 4, 2009, at 9:05 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
>> There are the cutting edge people whom any update of TeXLive ravishes and who are thriving on debugging TeXLive 2009. And these are the people whom the "latest", whether hard or soft, indeed "forces" them to upgrade.
>> 
>> But then there are those of us who "are typically very slow to update their computers and computing techniques" whom, regardless of what is in the latest TeXLive, would seem more likely than not just to ignore the latest TeXLive and keep on going with what they have. These, then certainly do not feel "forced" by the "latest" to upgrade anything.
>> 
>> I must be missing something.
> 
> 

<- snip ->

> The issue here is that there is a point at which support for TeX on PPC shouldn't be expected to outlast support for the current OS and development tools.
> 


I think this is an important point. As the compilers, etc. advance, developers are forced to keep up. Apple has a policy of supporting the current OS as well as the previous one, but not before (I mean, X.n and X.n-1). So the developer would be committed to maintaining versions frozen at various points as well as those that run on the latest system. As the latest development tools allow the developers to do things that the old tools didn't, there would be start to be divergences in features, capabilities, etc.

This just pushes the question back to the developer tools and compilers, etc. Why should *they* move ahead in a manner that makes the software developed with them

LaTeX itself, of course, is remarkably stable, one of its central virtues, designed precisely to avoid these problems with new OS's and hardware.

I think that Windows OS's are supported for a long, long time?

------------------
Adam M. Goldstein PhD, MSLIS
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