[tex-live] your eqexam package

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 9 July 2010 Victor Ivrii wrote:

 > On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 11:19 AM,  <cfrees at imapmail.org> wrote:
 > > I was really determined not to respond to this thread... but now it is
 > > logic...
 > 
 > > This appears to assume that "TeX users on Linux" and "most
 > > ordinary users" are mutually exclusive. If TL cannot be included
 > > in their distros, "ordinary TeX users on Linux" would miss much
 > > more than one or two packages.
 > 
 > I wish they would not include TeX at all. Our Dept server came with
 > teTeX a couple years ago (Red Hat is extremely conservative) and
 > despite I maintain there TL (2009 and 2010-pretest at the moment)
 > the majority of my esteemed colleagues use teTeX. Net-install is
 > soooo easy

Net-install is easy indeed, but consider that in a Linux distribution
TeX Live is only one package among thousands of others.  You are
maintaining TeX Live yourself because 

 1. The Linux distribution you have to use isn't updated regularly

 2. You are interested in the latest stuff

 3. You are testing things before they are officially released.

I don't know much about Red Hat.  Is this an enterprise edition (like
CentOS) where only security fixes are provided?  In this case you
certainly have to maintain TeX Live yourself.  You also have to
install TeX Live on a server yourself if you want to make it available
to clients in a heterogenous network.  Linux distributors don't ship
binaries for other platforms.

I think that most Linux users are using distributions which provide a
package manager which supports updating.  These distributions do not
provide the latest TeX Live release, they lag 1..2 years behind, but
this is acceptable, because not everybody needs the latest stuff.

Not everybody regards TeX as the most important program and it's not
wrong to use an older release.  Sure, teTeX is too old and only a
subset of TeX Live.  But imagine what happens if TeX Live is removed
from Linux distributions and GCC, libc... developers do the same.

Then we end up in a Windows-like environment where users have to
maintain 3rd-party software themselves.  This is unacceptable.

I just want to run "emerge --update world" in order to update the
whole system (Gentoo Linux).  I'm maintaing my TeX Live installations
myself only because I'm more a developer rather than a user.

Why do you say that it's better to remove TeX Live from Linux
distributions?  Because your esteemed admins don't trust you and
refuse to put the binaries you maintain into $PATH?  Do they think
that there is no need to support TeX Live because teTeX is already
available?  I'm wondering because you are obviously maintaining a
recent TeX Live system and say "the majority of my esteemed colleagues
use teTeX".  This sounds like a $PATH issue.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
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