[Slackbuilds-users] Tex Live 2014 - Update / Part 2

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 30 Jun 2014, Robby Workman wrote:

> Well, we need a TeX distribution in Slackware, if only to build docs and
> such when upstream sources require it. I think there's a general consensus
> that tetex simply isn't adequate for "real" TeX users, so they have to
> replace it with TeX Live in order to do their own work.

   I must be missing something important. I've been using the tetex included
with Slackware since I adopted this distribution in 2003. I've writen a book
in it (published by Springer), prepare figures and plots with PSTricks, and
do more than 90% of my writing with it (using the LyX front end for
convenience). I recall reading several years ago that the tetex author (Tom
E<something>) was no longer maintaining it so it would be replaced. I
thought that TeXLive was the replacement, yet I see that tetex is still in
the Slackware distributions.

   Over the past decade I've not experienced any deficiencies in my use of
tetex. I switched to TeXLive-2010 only because I thought tetex was
deprecated.

   None of this bears on Robby's anguish over how to move TeXLive into the
distribution, yet I'd like to learn why tetex is not adequate (I consider
myself a 'real' LaTeX user) and why it's still in the distribution if
maintanence was dropped a while ago.

A curious mind would like to know,

Rich