What is the plan with TeXLive?

Question

After struggling for almost a year to get the TeXLive packages from community to work on my system, I am left wondering if there is any real plan to have TeXLive replace tetex in ArchLinux. TeXLive 2007 has been out over a year and there are still bugs in the packages that are not present when doing a standard DVD iso install from over a year ago.
While I think firmicus has done an excellent job creating the initial set of TeXLive packages; I fear there are not enough people doing debugging on these packages, when tetex still sits in core as the default latex installation mechanism. TeXLive requires a lot of testing and debugging (debian has a taskforce for it) and having only a handful of people testing these packages still is leaving many bugs unchecked even though these packages have been out for months.
I am hoping that the testing for TeXLive 2008 is handled in a more systematic way when it is released this summer; and that maybe, the devs will consider formally replacing tetex as it ceased development back in 2006.

Answer 1

ConnorBehan wrote:But anyway that's beside the point... the package I wanted was pidgin-latex and I looked at the dependencies and saw "tetex" so I installed "tetex." I wasn't thinking about how many TeX implementations were available and the current status of each one, I was just blatantly reading dependencies and installing them. As a result I got stuck with an unmaintained obsolete package and didn't even realize it until about 4 months later.
Just to clarify: tetex is unmaintaned, by it is by no means obsolete.
As far as binaries go: *the tex language* itself was frozen in 1989 by its author, Donald Knuth. The only things that evolve are some of its extensions, most notably pdftex. Moreover, the only visible difference I was able to track down since pdftex shipped with tetex to now is that when you include certain types of pictures (some jpg's or png's or pdf's), they render a bit better in the new one than in the old one. With the new tl2008 should come luatex, ok, but that's still a new stuff and people using it definitely know about texlive/tetex difference.
So for instance, for pidgin-latex it makes *no difference* whether you have tetex or texlive installed.
As far as packages go: yes, they evolve, but slowly. For instance for writing papers (eg. in most of mathematics) it makes no difference whether you're using tetex of texlive.
I don't mean to say that we should not move in the direction of eventually replacing tetex with texlive completely (and I'm willing to contribute); I just don't like when I see screams "tetex is obsolete! we must ditch it immediately! all the dev/user power to test texlive!", without *an example* why it's actually worth the effort (except for repeating "tetex is obsolete!"). After asking this in the original texlive thread someone actually produced an example (with the included pictures, as mentioned above), but that's the only one when someone actually *needed* to use newer pdftex.
EDIT:
Stefan Hussmann wrote:'Oh, that package is official, let us take that.' So moving it to unsupported would be a good step.
I'm all in for that. Nevertheless, I think people care less about extra/community, and more about the dependencies (like ConnorBehan noted).
Last edited by bender02 (2008-04-15 21:53:37)