[XeTeX] TL2008 on Ubuntu

[Pander]

وفا خلیقی wrote:
> What is the point of packaging TL08 in any Linux distribution anyway?
> 
> Any Linux User has advanced knowledge of various programming languages
> and I am sure downloading and configuring TL directly is super-easy. It
> is just a waste of time to package TL.
> 
> Honestly, How hard it is to install and configure TL08? packaging TL
> seems stupid.

Interesting opinion you have. Well, I happen to have another opinion
about this. Bare with me for a moment to explain why. For me,
personally, building from source is not a problem at all. However,
having a package manager controlling all the applications on your system
is advisable, because of:

- ensuring library version interdependencies are met correctly

- ease of installation, up grading and down grading and management of
related config files

- non-technical GNU/Linux users can use TeX without having the skills to
build from source. Building from source is really a bridge too far for
many, they don't care about technology and should not care about it.
They are simply end users, but which are welcome to use TeX.

- not all users have the permissions to install custom software, they
can only request installations of packages via their admin (who is not
allowed to install from sources, as no time or simply doesn't feel
like). This is actually a very big issue. Certain organisations have
very strict rules about what can be installed on desktops or servers. If
it is not in the distro repo, simply forget about it.

- discouraging building from source for those people that tent to mess
up systems. I have seen many systems with custom build apache-ssl
etcetera without any need for it, packages already exist. And these were
terrible to administrate because nothing was in the place you expect it
to be.

- installing from source sometimes causes a problem when files are not
in a newer release, make uninstall doesn't always remove all files from
an older version. Package managers are always aware what to remove. One
way of solving this, is keeping the source from where you did an make
install, so you can do a make uninstall, but I don't feel like keeping
all those sources around for that reason.

And probably more reasons are supporting packaging TL08.

I would even go as far like Scribus. They offer a special scribus-ng deb
line for your sources.list and you can install the testing version (all
with extension -ng) next to the stable version, all via package management.

For packagers at Ubuntu, it is welcomed that they also get newer
versions pushed downstream towards them, because they are not always
aware about what version is coming out at what moment.

In short, I respect your personal choice of installing, nevertheless, I
hope TL08 gets packaged real soon and future versions and updates are
packaged even sooner.

Regards,

Pander


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