TeX Live 2012 released
latex-community.orgI'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 Because of this mess every distro at least has an outdated Texlive.
Easy to say and hard to do.
TeX distributions are getting more complex and much bigger, while at the same time providing a _much_ better user experience than a few years ago. TeX live for example has the "full" distribution scheme as default and the users always never have to install things found somewhere on the net by themselves. It just works for most people around us.
As soon as you start splitting things up, it's hard for the users to follow.
"We" keep getting questions from Linux users that "package X is not available and how can I install it? I've tried [many horrible things]?" The answer is usually "install package texlive-something" of your distro. For these users the user experience is worse than installing the full texlive.
One really nice thing is with current texlive (> 2011) is that you can get updates between release cycles. This also makes (IMO) the user experience much better but is in contradiction to what most distros need.
What do you mean with "fix this mess"? I have done the first packaging of TeX Live ever for Debian in 2005, and I am responsible also for the "mess" upstream, so if you have complains, esp what you want to get "fixed", then be more specific!
This is why I am eternally grateful to Norbert Preining...
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.
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).
Indeed, 12.04 will contain texlive 2012: http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/texlive
I think you mean 12.10, if you're linking to Quantal.
Indeed.
This could be useful: https://launchpad.net/~texlive-backports/+archive/ppa/
TeXLive 2012 in Ubuntu 12.04. I just found it so I haven't tried it yet.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
I tought TeXLive was supposed to be always backwards compatible.
The two big issues tend to be things like the LaTeX core requiring extra configuration when it decides it is outdated (usually after 5 years old), and this happens in xetex as well, and questions of changes of packages.
can't you just keep installing texlive 2010 (for example) to get a "stable" snapshot?
The problem is that in most servers, the admins are going to greatly prefer working with the distribution folks to ensure everything is properly maintained and secure. Consequently there is a huge bias towards what is on the repos, and a huge bias against installing more than you have to from external sources. This is one reason we are working in getting into repos (we will be in Ubuntu and are already in Debian Testing btw).
So no, that doesn't work. What does work and keeps our customers happy is making sure that what we have works with what versions they get from their vendors.
TeX is not just for desktops. It is a wonderful part of an automatic document generation system.
In case you are wondering what we are doing, the project is LedgerSMB (http://www.ledgersmb.org) and we use TeXLive mostly for generating PDF invoices, purchase orders, etc, along with Perl modules like Template::Plugin::Latex (unfortunately XeTeX requires hacking some of our dependencies currently :-( but that's not the TeXLive folks' fault!)
Anyway I think we are still supporting TexLive 2007.....
"Anyway I think we are still supporting TexLive 2007"
Just as well as that is what is in RHEL/CentOS/Scientific Linux repos.
As long as my documents are forward compatible, I don't mind which vintage of LaTeX I use.
I have to ask a rhetorical question: What does the version of ubuntu has to do with the version of texlive?
If you use the ubuntu/debian package management system to install texlive (e.g. apt-get install texlive-full) you get a version that contains packages from 3 years ago.
These often contain bugs that have long been fixed or are incompatible with tools they interface with (e.g. gnuplot/pgf).
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.
Does anyone see a good reason for MikTeX users to switch to TeX Live?
See the discussion here: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/20036/243
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/
$ tlmgr update --self
tlmgr: Cannot load TeX Live database from http://ctan.mackichan.com/
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.
Ha, I always forget that! Thanks!