[tex-live] cygwin install of tetex-20120119 broken.

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2012-02-05 at 22:51:21 +0000, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

 > Ken Brown <kbrow1i at gmail.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > On 2/5/2012 2:55 PM, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
 > > > I suppose that they are maintaining a subset of TeX Live and use the
 > > > name tetex in order to indicate that it's not a complete TeX Live.
 > > 
 > > No, this is not the case.
 > 
 > tex live does have a "tetex" package:
 > 
 >   shortdesc scripts and files originally written for or included in teTeX

Yes.  It's an installation scheme provided by Werner Fink in order to
generate a teTeX-like subset from TeX Live for the SuSE Linux distribution.
 
 > it contains a few man pages, some dvips config, encoding and map files,
 > and a couple of scripts.

I hope it contains dependency entries for other packages too, so that
you get a usable TeX installation.

Don't know whether anybody is using this scheme any more today.  The
only reason to use this scheme is if you are short of disc space, for
instance if you distribute the stuff on CDs or DVDs.
 
When Thomas announced that teTeX is discontinued, there had been many
discussions about how to maintain it in the future.  Especially Linux
distributors were worried.  With the tetex installation scheme Werner
proved that one can easily create a teTeX-like distribution from an
up-to-date version of TeX Live.  Even if nobody needs "scheme tetex"
anymore today, IMO it was exactly the right thing at the time it has
been written.  It proved at least that it's much easier to derive a
customized TeX distribution from a current TeX Live rather than
maintaining teTeX itself forever.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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