
TeX Live 2012 released - krzysz00
http://www.latex-community.org/home/news/46-news-latex-distributions/448-texlive-2012
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farslan
I've dealt with Packaging of Texlive for a Linux distro. My god, it was the
worst experience I ever had. They should first fix this mess. Because of this
mess every distro at least has an outdated Texlive.

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dfc
This is why I am eternally grateful to Norbert Preining...

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farslan
I know him (not personal tough), but I read several documents and how-to's of
him. As you mentioned I think he has really done an extra ordinary work.

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matt4711
It is very unfortunate that ubuntu 12.04 is still only shipping texlive 2009.

I think 12.10 will include texlive 2011 or 2012 (hopefully).

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einhverfr
Maybe not quite directed at you but this touches on a different negative
experience I have had.

One of the interesting problems I have had with various parts of the TexLive
community (not sure if it is everywhere) is an unwillingness to discuss
support for older versions.

It is one thing to desire that cutting-edge releases release relatively
cutting-edge versions. It is very different to insist that long term support
distros keep up with the cutting edge.

My software runs on servers. I have no expectation that we will see current
TexLive versions installed and every expectation that we won't. Yet we do the
best we can and when something blows up (xelatex complaining about being
outdated and having to be configured from the command-line) we address it.
It's just discouraging to hear over and over that we should be requiring the
latest and greatest.

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norbusan
Support for older versions, good question. Yeah, I understand the need, but
there is a simple reason, manpower. We are quite overloaded with keeping the
normal process running. Doing this in parallel is not something we can do.

But, the scripts we use to build the stuff etc are all in the archive and
documented, so anyone can checkout the 2010 or older release, and start a
separate repository putting only fixes in. I don't see any reason not to do
it, besides that nobody _will_ do it.

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einhverfr
Just to clarify.....

If I am working on an older version, I don't expect you to backport bugfixes
of CTAN packages. However, if I am asking for help because latex won't run
without extra configuration because it says it is too old, getting an idea of
how to fix it instead of being reflexively told "upgrade" would be nice. In
the end when that happened to me I had to figure it out on my own.

Here's the thing "that's a bug that was more recently fixed. You might try
going about this in a different way." is perfectly valid support for server
software. It would even be enough to say "that package seems to work for me on
a newer version."

But when it comes to running LaTeX and there is a time-bomb in the program, it
is nice to know how to get around it in an automated, non-interactive
environment.

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norbusan
Oh that one ... we had that down there in Debian at some point. I guess that
is easy to fix in latex.ltx from which the format is dumped. Yeah, this time-
bomb is a strange thing. I am not happy about it ... but who wants to discuss
with the LaTeX maintainers ;-)

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einhverfr
It's a lot harder to deal with in non-interactive environments. What I had to
do was something like cd to the texmf directory and run the commands that it
said were failing (primarily latex and xetex-related). It took me a while to
figure it out.

Oh well, got it documented at least. I was mostly annoyed at the responses I
got to requests for help. :-)

Just to be clear, we've had version-related issues with other thins in the
past too, such as Perl arbitrary math libs changing behavior in ways that
caused crashes, the way PostgreSQL changed stuff in 8.3 and 9.1 and a few
others. This sort of thing is normal and we can all accept that things change
and that if you are going to deal with supporting a range of versions, you are
going to have to deal with the fact that behavior won't be the same.

It's more a criticism of the culture I encountered when I asked for help.

Anyway TexLive on the whole has made my life easier with the rare exception. I
am a huge LaTeX and XeTeX fan. I have written books using it. And aside from
the issues relating to upgrading, the culture around it is very helpful and
professional. Thanks for listening to my gripes. On the whole the community
rocks.

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mark_l_watson
For OS/X it looks like TexShop has an update also:
<http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/texshop/>

I have written several books using TexShop - love it.

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mih
Does anyone see a good reason for MikTeX users to switch to TeX Live?

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patrickg
See the discussion here: <http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/20036/243>

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JadeNB
Has anyone who used the pre-test build had trouble with this switch? Since the
`pretest` repository that I was using went away, I had to switch repositories,
so:

    
    
        $ tlmgr option repository http://ctan.mackichan.com/
    

but then:

    
    
        $ tlmgr update --self
        tlmgr: Cannot load TeX Live database from http://ctan.mackichan.com/
    

This doesn't seem to be an issue with the specific mirror; browsing to the
mirror manually shows that it is live, and changing the mirror doesn't help.
`tlmgr` has been updating just fine (from the old `pretest` mirror) for
months, so I don't think it's an installation issue.

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norbusan
That is a CTAN mirror, and not a path to a tlnet. You have to use
<http://ctan.mackichan.com/systems/texlive/tlnet> and that works fine.

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JadeNB
Ha, I always forget that! Thanks!

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kghose
<http://tug.org/texlive/>

