[tex-live] movie15 and media9

Taco Hoekwater taco at elvenkind.com
Mon Mar 19 10:46:52 CET 2012


Hi all,

It is probably a good thing that these days I do not read email on
Sunday, otherwise I could not have resisted jumping into the discussion
as it unfolded. This morning I read all of it at once, and looking at
how long the thread is already with all the heated replies that have
been posted, I have no real interest any more in jumping in.

Nevertheless ...

On 03/18/2012 11:01 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> The short-term answer, as pointed out by several people (thank you), is
> that these packages and any others can be put into tlcontrib.  That's
> one of the reasons tlcontrib was created.  (That is, I don't speak for
> tlcontrib, but that's my understanding from Taco's article that I
> edited. :) (By the way, in the TL'12 release it will be easier to use
> multiple repositories.)

Yes, tlcontrib exists for such packages. Actually, tlcontrib only exists
because of a similar tex-live thread years ago!

Tlcontrib is not perfect by any means (and I have not done a lot
of work on it in the past year because I have been swamped with bill-
paying work) but last I checked, it worked fairly well with TL2011, and
that will only get better. If I remember the (partially internal)
emails from Norbert correctly, then in TL2012 users will even be able
use both tlnet and tlcontrib at the same time. In any case, Norbert and
Karl have both been very, very helpful in making tlcontrib work nicely
with texlive.

While (as I am sure most relevant people already know) I do not
personally agree with the texlive policy as it stands, I do firmly
believe we have a practical solution that works, and it is not lacking
in support from the texlive team itself. So, I would like to ask
everybody to stop having this fruitless discussion. It is getting us
nowhere, and it only serves to aggrevate people on both sides of the
fence.

> The longer-term answer is for free software PDF readers to implement
> these features.  I urge capable programmers to get involved with poppler
> (or something) to help.

Please add my vote to that as well. I would love to have a free pdf
reader that knows how to handle javascript, ocgs, forms and annotations.

Taco


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