perhaps a smaller latex for 3.4?

I just wanted to point out that there is a variant of tetex (which seems
to be tailored for cygwin) that is substantially smaller than the standard
tetex distribution of texmf.  It is called tetex-tiny.

The cygwin binary distribution for tetex-base is about 45Mbytes and that of 
tetex-tiny about 11Mbytes.  A 35Mbyte savings. Things would be different for 
a debian install but hopefully not too different.

Of course there is a penalty. Tetex-tiny supports only the computer modern 
fonts (I think). 

This would provide basic functionality, but fancy documents would look lousy
because of missing fonts.

I dont know if it is worth figuring out how to build it under debian, but if 
Klaus responds positively then maybe we should contact the maintainer 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke at gnu dot org> and see whether it could be
integrated into the standard tetex distribution to make it usable with 
debian-knoppix. 

Phil