On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
Now I know what you mean. Even if you can resolve all conflicts, in my opinion it is not desirable to have two teTeX versions installed on a system. This always leads to confusion though it is theoretically possible.
It is both possible (on *n*x, at least) and necessary.
Many software packages contain documentation in tex form. Often the configuration tools check for /usr/bin/tex or for a certain rpm package, so if the user has only TeX Live installed from some NFS share, they can't build the docs. While it is possible to tweak things to use TL, too often you end up chasing down missing macro packages, etc. It is much easier to stick with the exact tools used by the package author, even if they are not suitable for your current projects.
The "environment modules" package makes it easy to switch between TeX packages (assuming they are configured to run from different top-level trees -- if you need /usr/bin/tex to change then things get messy). It _is_ rather too easy to jump into something without checking which version is currently active, and sometimes you have done "configure ; make ; make docs" before you realize the problem.
-- George N. White III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
