On 06/03/2008, Martin Costabel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Alexander Hansen wrote: > [] > > > With regard to TeX, we seem to have vocal people who want a newer TeX > > distro but purport not to know what to do to implement it. We should > > make extra sure that changing from tetex is as painless as possible, to > > satisfy everybody. > > > Some more remarks on the tex situation: > > - Fink needs, for various reasons, its own tex package. This needs to be > able to coexist with a tex system installed from one of the texlive > variants. > - The currently existing Fink tetex packages may be outdated, but they > are good enough for a lot of people. This includes myself, and I and > people around me are using it in our work on a daily basis. But this > includes also a very active group of Fink users and developers in Japan > who would probably object seriously if Fink suddenly switched to a less > well-tested new version with a completely different structure.
I can say that the Debian TeXlive based packages work for me and I would appreciate having the same TeX version on all systems so that I can process the same documents in the same way. Unfortunately this is not as easy. I had to update a template that was created for an earlier TeX version (probably TeTeX) for it to work with the new TeX. That's because I use non-english documents that require encoding other than Latin1. The support for different languages has been traditionally poor and very fragile in TeX (as in many other projects created by (only) English speaking people). Even for different Latin scripts, CJK is probably even worse. So the upgrade to texlive would require not only a working set of packages but also updating all the documents and processing scripts in Fink and perhaps an upgrade howto for various languages so that users can port their local documents. I suspect this is a task that cannot be completed by a single person or even multiple people in a historically short amount time. I guess the packages should be able to coexist in some way until problems in the new packages are ironed out. If both TeTeX and TeXlive cannot be reasonably installed at the same time at least packages should be provided for both so that they can be swapped if necessary. Thanks Michal ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.apple.fink.devel
