tex live 2021 installation question

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi all,

I know people who use 5 years old TeX Live even now and are happy with
it. I can undestand that distro's TeX is the right version for many
users although it can be incomplete and not always up-to-date. This is
not a problem for the majority of documents owing to long-time
stability of TeX. On the contrary, there are developers, testers and
people with special needs who cannot be satisfied with distro's TeX.
One of my recent projects was typesetting a book in 56 languages
including those which do not use latin alphabet. You can thus
understand that I am such person with special needs. Even if you do
not know whether distro's TeX is sufficient for you and decide to use
TeX Life, it is OK. At least you learn how to install and maintain it.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml

st 18. 8. 2021 v 23:49 odesílatel Karl Berry <karl at freefriends.org> napsal:
>
> Hi Bob,
>
>     Similarly, tug.org recommends using their installer---not the
>     linux distribution's package manager.
>
> I don't exactly "recommend" using the native TL installer. Do I?
> Have I forgotten what I wrote? If you can tell me where you saw this,
> I'd like to review it.
>
> What I intend to say in this regard is that 1) if you use the distro
> version, please don't expect our instructions and descriptions to apply,
> and 2) often distros are not up to date (but sometimes they are).
>
> In general, plenty of people use TL as packaged by their distros, and
> that's perfectly fine. I'm happy when anyone uses TeX in any way they
> wish :).
>
>     install Tex Live into their home directory by resetting TEXDIR.
>
> Where "TEXDIR" is a setting that only exists inside install-tl.
> It's not an environment variable that you can set and will magically
> change everything. At least not in upstream TL. (And I'd be quite
> surprised if any distro supports such a TEXDIR envvar, but what do I know.)
>
> Thanks for the nice summary, in any case. --best, karl.