Public bug reported: Ever since the death of teTeX, TeX has always been lagging on Linux distributions, which is at best unfortunate, given that:
1) Many people working on scientific fields would generally love to run LaTeX on a linux machine and often they need to stay with Windows because only on that platform LaTeX is up to date. 2) Given that most publishers only give templates in LaTeX and Microsoft Word and the Word templates are full of subtle things that break in Libreoffice, LaTeX is really the only way to do serious work on Linux Historically, after teTeX disappeared, Linux distros migrated to TeXLive. Initially they remained stuck at texlive 2007. For instance Debian/Ubuntu moved to TeXLive 2009 in 2010 and now that we are almost in 2012 they are almost 3 years late in TeX stuff. To the best of my knowledge some distros (Fedora?) are still at TeXLive 2007, now lagging by almost 5 years. Three or even five years are an eternity in computing. IMHO, lagging so much not only creates problem to the users (who get old, unpatched stuff and cannot try new TeX developments like LuaTeX) but also frustrates developers (since their stuff does not get to Linux users who typically are very good at providing feedback). Ultimately, it may slow down the very development of TeX. To the best of my understanding, the reason for this lagging is that packaging of TeXlive is a huge huge work. Something that goes well beyond the time that the packagers may have. In this situation, given that: 1) TeXLive has its own package manager 2) It is already possible to use the vanilla TeXLive on Ubuntu following some steps ( http://tug.org/texlive/debian.html) which involve setting up some apt equivs to make the debian package manager happy (http://tug.org/texlive/files/debian-control-ex.txt) I think that it would be very sensible to set up a minimalistic TexLive-2011-installer deb package that merely automates the installation/removal of the vanilla TeXLive. I have created this bug report as a needs-packaging. I do not know if this is appropriate. In case this should not be a bug report, but a blueprint, please let me know so that one can be set up. ** Affects: ubuntu Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: needs-packaging -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/905328 Title: Texlive installer package should be created To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/905328/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
