Re: Redhat and Tetex

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, A.Mani wrote:

> One thing that this long discussion has been missing is the fact that
> tex in general and tetex in particular has tremendous potential in the
> commercial arena too, especially in handling huge databases. There are
> many good examples of such usage even in third-world countries like
> India. I think ALL linux distros must take that into account and this
> way the free Fedora can be better.

All true, but the number of heavy commercial TeX users is small and can
afford to invest time and effort in building and configuring TeX to fit
their own needs, or even purchase a commercial TeX.  The fact remains that
a commercial linux vendor gets very little return for the effort needed to
provide a current TeX distro because a vanishingly small fraction of their
customers need a current version.  Many technical users are happily making
.dvi files with tetex 1.x.

The crunch comes for groups like small secretariats for international
technical organizations (a couple are hosted at the institute where I
work).  These organizations have tiny budgets and produce both print and
electronic documents. While much of their work can be and is done using
*Office, these tools are not up to the demands of typesetting technical
documents that should form part of an archival record.  In principle, TeX
is ideal for their needs, but in practice, getting compatible TeX
configurations working on O(10^2) systems at labs scattered around the
world with different hardware and OS standards, national languages, and
policies regarding 3rd party software is impractical.

Ideally, a reasonably functional, current, and easily installable TeX
distro should be available for all the major OS's.  In practice, this
fails:

1.  for binary distros due to conflicts in library versions or changes to
system services.  An example from TL2003 is the problem with ConTeXt's
perl scripts, which expect to run "D:/.../bin/win32/kpsewhich.exe", which
fails on Win9x due to the forward slashes.  These are all technical issues
that can be overcome at the cost of enormous effort in testing and
coding.

2.  due to incompatiblities with older TeX distros.  Many source packages
use TeX to format documentation, and will fail to build on systems with a
newer TeX than was used by the package author.  The current effort to
support spaces in filenames is likely to create many such incompatibil-
ities with older macro packages and source files.

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