[tex-live] problem with babel package

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 20.05.2011 um 11:16 schrieb Robin Fairbairns:

> istm an impossible dichotomy has been proposed here -- either people
> manage their own stuff (by taking packages direct from ctan or from the
> tl repository) or they have no way of correcting bugs.
> 
> a third alternative would be to publish patches.  this is equally
> distasteful, since the na\"if user will either patch a copy of
> the package that goes with their document, or they'll incorporate
> patching code into their document.  this makes the document immune to
> any later improvement of the package.
> 
> note that, by default, many people's tex live won't change in the
> lifetime of their system: here, for example, that will be 3 years for a
> phd student (who finishes on time[*]) or 5 years or more for the
> "ordinary" member of faculty.

Outside of this thread the discussion seems to converge to "always install TL from the net and never from the system repositories":

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18939

So your first option seems to be the state of the art solution. Given that, it might be best to remove all dependencies to TeX Live in the Linux distribution repos: often users want to install e.g. Kile and can't do so without installing the distro's TL they don't want (at least on Ubuntu that happened all the time).
Still I think that e.g. TL 2009 is good enough for most ordinary people (it's newer than Word 2007, after all ;-), but I'm not the one to decide that, of course.