Re: Do teTeX packages work well?
Paul Seelig writes:
> Mark Phillips writes:
>
> > I think it is in Debian's interest to think carefully about how to get
> > the best possible TeX distribution. I think for a lot of people, having
> > a great TeX distribution would be a major selling point for the
> > distribution. At the moment, Debian's TeX direction seems a little
> > confused.
>
> Actually i thought that teTeX was supposed to and is the solution for
> what you seem to recognize as Debian's confused TeX direction!? IMHO
> the fact that teTeX has become part of Debian is a major reason to
> consider installing Debian. I suppose that teTeX is at the moment the
> state of the art of all the Unix TeX distributions available.
Don't misunderstand me, the packaging of teTeX seems to me to be a great
improvement over the existing TeX packages. When I say that "Debian's TeX
direction seems a little confused", I mean that:
1. There still exist the original TeX packages. If teTeX is the way to
go, should we be phasing these old packages out?
2. Although teTeX covers the most important TeX things, it isn't as
complete as NTeX for example. Should we have a strategy for making
teTeX the base TeX distribution, with additional packages "adding
value" to it (ie including the things teTeX misses)?
If we abandoned the old TeX packages, we could then refocus these energies
towards adding value to teTeX. Is this a good idea?
But I have one small doubt about my strategy. It seems to me that the
advantage with the old TeX packages is that they broke the TeX stuff into
small chunks. This meant you could pick and choose which bits you wanted.
Is this also true of teTeX.deb or must you install all or nothing?
In summary, I am not critisizing the addition of teTeX -- far from it,
rather I am suggesting that we clarify the direction forward from
here.
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Mark Phillips mark@maths.flinders.edu.au
"They told me I was gullible ... and I believed them!"
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