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From: kientzle@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Are the saved seconds worth the lost hours? (Was: Build complete LaTeX from source?)
Message-ID: <kientzleDF9o6H.Eos@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <437eac$n68@mailnews.kub.nl> <439e1m$5oc@atusks02.aut.alcatel.at> <43ifl2$ckd@radon.stanford.edu>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 17:49:29 GMT
Lines: 34
Sender: kientzle@netcom21.netcom.com
In article <43ifl2$ckd@radon.stanford.edu>,
Vaughan R. Pratt <pratt@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>I started to write a whiny message about the above not being good
>enough, FreeBSD needs all this [TeX/LaTeX] stuff ready-made if it is to be
>competitive with Linux.
This is a reasonable comment, but falls a little bit flat in this
case. A good LaTeX system is a large collection of software with a
lot of different pieces. Many of those pieces are updated by
different groups of people with remarkable regularity (witness the
current work on the psfonts distribution and the addition of partial
font downloading to dvips). If you really want to use a seriously
up-to-date LaTeX system, no prepackaged system is going to be quite up
to snuff. Not to mention that if you are a serious user, you should
learn the system well at the beginning so you can update it easily.
In addition, the Unix web2c TeX on CTAN is pretty generic at this
point, and compiles on most platforms with a minimum of fuss. I don't
really see the point of simply copying stuff from CTAN to cdrom.com
just so it can be out of date. Better to refer people to the original
source in the first place.
Of course, for occasional use, there should be an easily-installable
package on the CD-ROM. I know there was one on the 2.0R CD-ROM,
though I must confess I never looked inside it.
- Tim Kientzle
P.S. Has anyone considered standardizing font locations? My PostScript
fonts are used by three completely different programs: LaTeX, GhostScript,
and X. I finally made a /usr/share/fonts/postscript heirarchy to store
them, which has significantly reduced the disk space I devote to fonts.
Just a thought.