[tex-live] experience report; suggestions

Norbert Preining preining at logic.at
Thu Aug 27 11:32:28 CEST 2009


Hi James,

first of all thanks for your helpful comments.

On Mi, 26 Aug 2009, James B. Mehl wrote:
> last year.  The installation program failed to run from the DVD for

The DVD has most probably mounted with the
	noexec
option that is there by default on most linux distributions. That
prevents installation since we have to run the lzmadec program from there.

That has been reported and answered several times here.

> mainly a scientific programmer, not a systems programmer.  I am not a
> user of rsync and would have appreciated some examples to help me obtain

Please remember that we are in testing phase, and we encourage people
to test it, but breakage is expected (and happened eg yesterday), and
installation is not as straight-forward because we do NOT mirror the
pre-release testing versions around CTAN.

> The installation went well, and my experience with this installation has
> been excellent.  I was extremely pleased to see many of my favorite

That is fine to hear.

> One suggestion, however:  I notice that you include RevTeX (American
> Physical Society).  There is a related package, JASA-TeX (Acoustical

We generally only include stuff that is on CTAN and of free license.
If the respective owner of the packages upload to CTAN and give a free
license the packages will be quasi automatically be included in TeX Live.

> don't see the version 3.2 that I've been using there.  The Springer
> files on CTAN are hopelessly out of date.

Then please either you upload new versions, or ask someone at Springer
to upload newer versions.

> At the end of the installation the following was printed to screen:
> 
>  Add /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/man to MANPATH.
>  Add /usr/local/texlive/2009/texmf/doc/info to INFOPATH.
>  Most importantly, add /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/x86_64-linux
>  to your PATH for current and future sessions.
> 
> This is probably a bad idea!  RHEL5 and most recent Fedoras (AFAIK) do

We cannot give hints for all the different distributions and variants.
That is up to the local (TeX) administrator. We not even wrote that 
you should use environmental variables. The above text hints at what
has to be done, but for the man pages one probably has to edit 
/etc/manpath or something.

> `xetex -ini  -jobname=cont-en -progname=context -8bit *cont-en.ini'

I assume that is a shared library problem. Can you do
	ldd /usr/local/texlive/2009/Master/bin/x86_64-linux/xetex

I assume that there is something like
	...
	libexpat.so.1 => not found
We are hoping to be able to fix that for the final release.

Best wishes

Norbert

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>        Vienna University of Technology
Debian Developer <preining at debian.org>                         Debian TeX Group
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