On Monday 25 August 2008 19:15:38 Steve Litt wrote:
> Second, I'm really bent out of shape (American idiom for extremely angry)
> because those fool packagers at Mandriva put in a 2004 Memoir package into
> Mandriva 2008.1. I've got nine months to get over my anger, but right now
> I'm inclined to switch to another distro next summer.
Hi Steve,
first I must say that I can understand your anger. :-)
OTHO I would like to give the other side of the coin. I am a Fedora
packager
and from our point of view (la)tex packaging is a mess. One of the things that
takes time with a new set of packages is to guarantee that everything works
and that there are no new problems when using different packages together.
Also from Fedora point of view we need to review the licenses to ensure that
all the packages have the right license (allow us to redistribute and modify)
with the non-commercial clause (as an example).
In conclusion for us to update the tex distribution is always an
adventure
(not necessarily in the best sense). I know that things have been improving,
as this has been a problem for long time, but we are still not there where
some random packager can feel confident to update a package like memoir to the
latest version in an easy way.
--
José Abílio
