Re: #debian-tetex is not exactly hopping....
From: Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
Subject: Re: #debian-tetex is not exactly hopping....
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 13:44:16 +0200 (CEST)
> On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
>
> > From: Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>
> > > I'm not sure whether we really need to have the latest version of
> > > everything - what are the great benefits of having a newer LaTeX? In my
> > > opinion it's perhaps worth it upgrading some packages inside teTeX when
> > > this fixes bugs, but I do usually prefer to stay with upstream and I
> > > prefer waiting half a year for a new teTeX over trying to upgrade
> > > everything ourselves.
> >
> > I agreed. Perhaps tetex-update containing only the latest
> > LaTeX is sufficient and makes the relation between other
> > tetex-* packages much simpler, I guess.
> >...
>
>
> There's ne thing I don't understand: Who will benefit from a package that
> contains the latest LaTeX? The normal user will see no difference or did I
> miss a big bug or a great feature that is a good reason to upgrade to the
> latest LaTeX?
I completely misunderstood your point. You asked why the
latest LaTeX was necessary...
Okay, I do not think it is much stable/bugfree than old version
and perhaps there is almost no difference in the output between
the latest LaTeX and the old version.
But it is not the point that whether output is different or not
nor whether it is much stable or not, but the point is that
LaTeX is an infrastructure (or fundamental component) of TeX
environment and there are users who wants the latest environment.
In practice, fmtversion of LaTeX in tetex package is 1999/12/01
at present (of unstable!) and this contains potential problem
causing errors that LaTeX is too old when one try to make
fmt file based on LaTeX. There are such fmt's like platex/jlatex
and cslatex etc. perhaps.
(This might be noticeable difference.)
Furthermore, a user who has great interest in TeX cares much
if an environment of TeX is latest or not, especially that of
LaTeX so if we provide the latest LaTeX it can attract TeX
experts to Debian and they might be potential/future maintainers
of tetex or TeX related packages then we might provide more good
environment of TeX in the near future.
And as I explained in another email we can provide the latest
LaTeX in a way that a user can select safely if he installs and
updates LaTeX or not and if tetex itself is updated with the
latest LaTeX then unnecessary, duplicated LaTeX will be automatically
removed.
So a user who thinks in a way as Adrian will install only
tetex-* and a user who wants the latest LaTeX will
install the package of the latest LaTeX in addition to
tetex-* package. So both kind of users are happy with the
latest LaTeX package.
Best Regards, 2001.6.7
--
Debian Developer & Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
Department of Math., Tokushima Univ.
Reply to: