On 06/19/2018 09:31 PM, Eric Barkan wrote: > This is in reply to Pavel Sanda's query about Texlive vs. Miktex. > Sorry, on my Fedora 28 system the "Reply to" button on the Mail > Archive does not seem to work. I get a blank screen on both Chrome > and Firefox. I may well be doing something wrong... > > Anyway, I owe great thanks to the LyX team for your terrific ongoing > work. I've been using LyX for almost 10 years now and I can't imagine > life without it. > > I've been mostly using Texlive on Linux for my own work; this has been > seamless at both install and run time. However, about 5 years ago I > helped a colleague install LyX on his Windows system using the > "Bundle" installer and thus with MikTex. This worked OK on the whole, > but there have been a few mysterious failures, especially when > installing new versions of LyX, even if the "simple" installer was > used with an existing Miktex installation. Problems were usually > cleared up by a complete reinstall of both MikTex and LyX, but that's > quite a bother.
I've seen many reports of this kind of thing. I believe the problem is that even the simple installer triggers a complete update of MiKTeX, which unsurprisingly tends to break things. > A couple of years ago this had became enough of an annoyance that we > decided to try a full Texlive installation on Windows after completely > removing Miktex. Lyx immediately detected Texlive and ran > flawlessly. This good experience has been repeated without exception > since then, through a number of version upgrades of LyX. Thanks for that info. > This experience left us wondering: why the emphasis on MikTex as > opposed to Texlive? Only Uwe could answer that question. Obviously, we are re-thinking that now. > It is true that the need to install Texlive and LyX separately might > be a bit more difficult for the uninitiated, but a person would have > to be able to do one installation anyway with the bundle installer and > seems to have a much greater chance of running into trouble that way. > This strikes me as not being a good tradeoff in user friendliness. It's possible we could incorporate the TeXLive installer into a "bundle" the same way we have previously with MiKTeX, but we will have to experiment with that a bit. > If Miktex compatibility is to be maintained as an official part of > LyX, I STRONGLY support the proposal to include a warning to the user > that their Miktex installation might be modified or harmed by the > installer. I think it will suffice to remove the forced update of packages. That does not make a lot of sense to me. Riki
