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Subject:
From:
Boris Veytsman <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 17 Jul 2002 22:20:07 -0400
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> Date:         Thu, 18 Jul 2002 02:38:55 +0100
> From: Timothy Murphy <[log in to unmask]>


>
> > 2. The state of TeX/LaTeX in Debian is high on the priority list for
> >    many LaTeX users I know, and very high for many system admins that
> >    support LaTeX on their machines.
>
> I find this very hard to believe.
>
> I have read thousands of postings about LaTeX,
> attended many TeX/LaTeX meetings,
> and do not recall ever hearing or seeing the word Debian in that context.
>
> (I just checked on dejanews,
> and as far as I could see the only postings on comp.text.tex
> with "Debian" in them concerned supposed bugs
> in the Debian implementation of TeX.)


Maybe this is exactly because Debian/LaTeX 'just works', and there are
no Debian-specific bugs now? If you do not see newspaper articles
about the quality of tap water, it does not mean that this quality is
unmportant. It might mean that the waterways work fine.

Right now there is nothing to tell about my Debian/LaTeX machines:
they happily do what I want, and I never post anything about them in
ctt or elsewhere. I am very much interested in keeping the situation
exactly like this.


>
> > If Debian starts to change the standard, I
> > will probably migrate to TeXLive again -- with all the problems this
> > migration would cause.
>
> Tell us one such problem.


Try to upgrade TeXLive to version 5 on, say, a dozen of different
machines in differents locations (so NFS is out of the question). To
make the situation more interesting, let some of the machines run
TeXLive 4 and some TeXLive 3. About half of the machines use libc5,
and half use libc6. All machines have different local settings, which
you must preserve. Some machines are several hundred miles from
you. There is no time for testing and QA. You have two hours to
complete the task. Any minute above this costs $NNN to your customers.

Then you might appreciate the Debian way:

for machine in $MACHINES; do
   ssh root@$machine apt-get update
   ssh root@$machine apt-get upgrade --yes
done

--
Good luck

-Boris

I suggest a new strategy, Artoo: let the Wookie win.
                -- C3P0

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