[tex-live] tl09 release status: coming up

[Victor Ivrii]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:15 AM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> we would like tex to
> be part of every system install,

I am not sure that it is such a good idea. Our Department orders RHL
because University administration believes it provides the best
stability and support. But it is very conservative and comes with
rather well established (aka obsolete) staff, in particular with
tetex-3.0 (at least it was the case a couple of years ago) and there
is very little incentive to update it (actually, on the contrary,
there are always a couple of my esteemed colleagues who have ancient
files which due to some miracle work with tetex-3 distribution but may
break with the newer packages and then the hell breaks loose; so
overloaded system administrators are rather scared to update TeX
especially to TeXLive because of accusations: "You changed the system
and my files stopped working" while in fact usually it is the case
with these users "slightly" changing something).

So, preinstalled TeX is a double-edged sword: it forces TeX in the
cases when it would not be installed otherwise but it forces obsolete
TeX in the cases when a newer version would be installed anyway

Victor
>



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