> Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 21:55:42 +0100
> From: Timothy Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> (1) The intersection of those interested in LaTeX
> and those seriously interested in Debian is almost empty, I imagine.
> I would have said it was empty,
> except that Frank Mittelbach seems to belong to both sets.
>
> (2) You (or someone else on the Debian "side")
> asked for the "LaTeX community" to comment on the discussion.
> I'm an ordinary LaTeX user,
> but I'm pretty sure that I speak for 95% (if not 100%) of LaTeX users
> when I say that satisfying the Debian licence
> comes very low indeed in my order of priorities.
>
I completely disagree with these points.
1. I know many LaTeX users. Debian is a distribution of choice for
many of them.
2. The state of TeX/LaTeX in Debian is high on the priority list for
many LaTeX users I know, and very high for many system admins that
support LaTeX on their machines.
I have several machines with LaTeX and Debian that I support. LaTeX
there is used for everyday work, automatic production of reports from
databases and other tasks. It is an important part of the system --
for some machine it is the reason of their employment. The fact that I
can easily maintain the systems by simple apt-get update/apt-get
upgrade is important for me. I remember too well the bad old times
where I ought to update the texmf tree manually. This ease of
maintaining made me migrate from TeXLive TeX to Debian standard
packages. I do not want to lose it.
If Debian will declare TeX suite (and this is not just about LaTeX --
this is about the core Knuthian system) non-DFSG and decrease or drop
support for it, it would make the life much harder for me.
Having said this, I need to note that the integrity of my (La)TeX
distribution on the production systems is higher in my priority list
than ease of maintaining. If Debian starts to change the standard, I
will probably migrate to TeXLive again -- with all the problems this
migration would cause.
--
Good luck
-Boris
I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone
has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top.
-- Professor Lowd, English, Ohio University
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