Re: RedHat and tetex

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Robin Fairbairns wrote:

> i don't believe that there's the slightest chance, now, that redhat will
> _ever_ bother with tex.  the non-tetex thing (fedora), the inheritor of
> tetex but on the debian model, will i expect get its act together; but
> the stability of yet another developer community to parallel debian has
> to be doubted.
>
> i'm very depressed about linux.  :-(

Don't worry, be happy, get a Mac (when it works, otherwise don't expect to
get it repaired within reasonable time/price bounds -- it took Apple
nearly 2 months to replace my DOA laptop).

Other packages (the R stats package, octave, even emacs -- all of which
use TeX for documentation) also suffer from neglect.  I'm sure this is
because people building commercial distro's know they can't make money
selling to academics.  The predictable result will be:

2004:  people buy a "current" distro and encounter problems trying to
use the provided but very old TeX distro.  The few who don't give up
are able to find a binary distro that works.

2005: distro's diverge to the point that it becomes difficult to provide a
binary package that works on all, and even persistent users are unable to
get TeX working.

2006: further divergence to the point that it becomes difficult to install
a current teTeX or Tex Live from sources on many popular linux distro's.
It is easier to create a linux distro that will run TeX than to get TeX
running on a popular distro, and TeX developers spend most of their time
hacking linux distros.

2007: If you can't beat them, join them.  TL2007 comes with its own linux
distro.

One possible way out is for university/professional groups to provide a
linux distro tailored to the needs of their users/members.  This would
probably include commercial tools (compliers, matlab, IDL, etc. at
substantial discounts from vendors who get exposure and don't have all the
problems of supporting a multitude of commercial distros) as well as
open source tools used in the academic community.

--
George N. White III  <[email protected]>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada