On Tuesday 26 August 2008 04:39:00 am José Matos wrote: > 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.
Thanks José, I never really thought of it from the packager's point of view, always figuring those guys were so Linuxly smart that somehow getting the package combo would be easy for them. But now that you mention it, I consider compiling LyX with a recent Qt4 a burden, so I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to put together a whole distro. Thanks for the different perspective. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
