Re: Upgrade procedure for tetex
In article <m0w246Q-000193C@miles.econ.queensu.ca> edd writes:
>
> Sue> As a long time latex user (10 years), I must agree that the current
> Sue> version sucks. It is barely usable. Many common fonts and macros are
> Sue> missing.
>
>I beg to differ (backed by 8 of LaTeX). Debian's TeX works very well for me,
>including documents that mix Adobe postscript fonts and standard fonts, lots
>of postscript graphs etc. I have about some local additions
> edd@miles:~> du -s /usr/local/lib/texmf/
> 1245 /usr/local/lib/texmf
>which helped me for my requirements in all (!!) my written communications
>over the last years.
I think part of the problem is the mixing of TeX and LaTeX which is
a problem I find with all distributions. What you need to run TeX
is minimal and I fail to see how any distribution could fail to
provide it (I have used TeTeX on an SGI system and also debian TeX,
in addition to having build my own on the majority of my harware
platforms).
The main problems are from my viewpoint (a TeX user, who doesn't like
LaTeX much -- but I do use TeX very heavily).
0) LaTeX -- this is usually integrated in with TeX, but I am not
sure how good an idea this is. Admittedly the only use I
can see for it is processing other people's documents.
1) LaTeX style files, formats etc. -- this is probably the area
where there are most problems, but I think much of this is
due to them being burried inside the main TeX package. Could
there not be a LaTeX package standard, and then it would be
easy for people to add %PACKAGE which they urgently need.
2) Fonts, metrics and the such like. Is there any reason why some
of this could not be split of into a separate package -- since
it is architecture independent?
3) Miscellananeous others
4) I feel that tex.web is a vital part of the system documentation,
and indeed there is a printed copy (all 535 pages) here which
I make reference to fairly often, when trying to understand
the non-functionality of some code [my generalised text
parser :-)] However the kpathsea, web2c code etc. are all
irrelevant. I would like to see the web files in the
doc directory, however my use of TeX may be atypical!
TeX is such a vital package that I upgrade it very infrequently -- the
number of bugs in the basic system is so low, that stability is far
more important for me.
Alan
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