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Re: #debian-tetex is not exactly hopping....



From: Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>
Subject: Re: #debian-tetex is not exactly hopping....
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2001 23:33:31 -0400

> Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp> writes:
> 
> > 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 has only been one LaTeX release since then... the differences
> are available at http://www.latex-project.org/ltnews/ltnews13.html.  

Yes, but it is LaTeX of a year and half ago ;-)

> The major substantial changes are AMS-LaTeX 2.0 and the new PS-NFSS.
> The new PS-NFSS requires a bunch of new support files (updated files
> for font metrics, virtual fonts and font definitions) which make it a
> more complex upgrade than normal.  

I think that AMSLaTeX and other stuffs like base, psnfss etc.
should be considered separately.

AMSLaTeX seems to be updated irregulary compared with other
stuffs.  For example, I updated amslatex-cur (for Debian JP)
sveral times after release and the latest amsclass.dtx is 
of ver. 2.08 (date 2000/10/26).

It seems that of tetex of Debian is of ver. 2.07 (date 2000/06/02)
and it is rather new compared with latex.ltx of tetex but yet
not the latest one.

> The new AMS-LaTeX can be downloaded and installed easily by oneself,
> so I don't think it's a very compelling argument for including the new
> LaTeX.

Yes, but then why it is bad for Debian to provide the latest
AMSLaTeX?  

I think if a user installed something (like AMSLaTeX) by himself 
it might cause trouble afterwards.  And it might be very difficult 
for us to find out the reason of the trouble if a user installed 
non-Debian-package class files etc. by himself.

> In general, I think that the LaTeX community is conservative enough
> that we can wait for the upstream on this.  (After all, the next LaTeX
> revision will be dated June 2001, and with the yearly release
> schedule, we might actually _see_ it sometime in the next few months.)
> There are people still using 1996 LaTeX, and someone who both knows
> the benefits of the latest LaTeX and cares about them can either
> install it themselves, or is already using a teTeX beta or TL6 (beta?
> I don't know offhand).  I don't know if TUGBoat is even using the
> latest one yet... I think they're using TeX Live 5, which has
> 1999/12/01.

Please read carefully my previous email.  I proposed the way
to provide flexible mechanism so that a conservative user can 
install only tetex-* packages and avant-garde user can enjoy the
latest LaTeX environment with latex-update, okay?

latex-update will not overwrite any files of tetex-* packages
at all and if a user removes latex-update then the original
tetex environment will be recovered safely.

Both kind of user will be satisfied and be happy!

> If you're interested in updated packages, I think the place to start
> is pdftex, where snapshots come out more frequently, fix more bugs,
> and in general have more user-noticable results.

This might be good but it should be done with someone
who is interested in pdftex, IMHO.

Personally, the present pdftex does not support Japanese so 
I am not interested in it so much (sorry ;-).



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