tetex FC6

[Michael A. Peters]

On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 00:09 +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:

> 
> While I don't disagree with this,
> I very much doubt if anything this dramatic is needed
> to solve the OP's problems.
> 
> I use the teTeX that comes with Fedora-6 quite a lot,
> and it works perfectly well for me.
> 
> I don't think it is nearly as easy as you suggest
> to replace teTeX by TeXLive.
> In my view, it would be unwise for the OP to follow your advice.

It is extremely easy for most users.
The last version teTeX and TexLive 2004 were essentially the exact same
thing with only the layout different.

Fedora's teTeX has some patches to make things better for Japanese
users, and it also patched the build system so that it used shared
libraries when it could. If you need those Japanese bits, then perhaps
TeXLive isn't such an easy transition (I don't know, I don't read or
write Japanese.)

I don't know if the Fedora packaging of LyX will "just work" or not - I
should try that. The tetex-* packages in Extras won't easily install,
but most if not all of them are already in TeXLive.

But teTeX is quite old, and some key macro packages (such as memoir)
have had signifigant changes to them, including bug fixes. While you
could manually update those packages in your texmf-local tree, you'll
often find that you have to update other macro packages to meet the
dependencies of the macro package you are updating. You'll also find
yourself needed to extract .dtx files etc. and generating documentation
- whereas with a fresh TeXLive install, the TeX system is up to date and
you may only occasionally need to install an errata package if the issue
affects you.

For teTeX compat simply install TeXLive 2004 or continue to use teTeX.
Which system you use is switched by simply changing which comes first in
your path.

It really is simple. Installing two versions of teTeX may not be (I've
never tried) but installing teTeX and as many versions of TeXLive as you
want is cake and you can switch between them due to the self contained
nature of TeXLive.

You can even share a single texmf-local tree between all of them.