Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

From: "George N. White III" <gnwiii@gmail.com>
To: "mailing list for ConTeXt users" <ntg-context@ntg.nl>
Subject: Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 08:27:15 -0300	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <22af238a0810030427y42fb664cx7fed754fdbb3117e@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <358C0125-ED07-4E9A-8E23-F01984467F77@uni-bonn.de>

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 11:55 AM, Thomas A. Schmitz
<thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:
>
>> You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue
>> with a
>> very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could
>> really not
>> know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user
>> could put
>> his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R
>> file.

TeX Live 2008 has TEXMFHOME set to $HOME/texmf in the default
configuration file (configured so ls-R is not needed).

> Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it
> a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just
> double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even
> though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's
> really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for
> their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX
> component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from
> DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I
> think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution.

Having TEXINPUTS set when TeX is not installed is not nice, but it is
really a trivial issue.  Someone who uses SuSE should post a note
explaining how to remove TEXINPUTS (hopefully in a way that will
survive updates) and file a bug report with SuSE.   Distributions are
can only be as "TeX friendly" as their users -- otherwise you get
what is needed to build program documents and no more.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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