[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up

[Alan Munn]

At 8:24 PM +0100 11/16/06, Claus Gerhardt wrote:
>
>Of course, after your announcement that [Gerben] will quit, I had a 
>look at the TeXLive home page and discovered that the installation 
>process TeXlive offered was simple and transparent, and when 
>finally, a few days later, I actually installed the original full 
>unix TeXLive version myself, I was surprised by the ease and 
>smoothness of this installation process without any patronizing by 
>the software, a quick, efficient, and transparent process that will 
>allow me in the future to control the tex versions that I use; 
>installing a new version will no longer cause an uncomfortable 
>feeling in my stomach, if the new version will work as smoothly for 
>me as the old one; if there will be problems a simple Applescript 
>will make the old version the default.

One thing that has been bothering me in this whole discussion is 
whether or not there are extras provided by Gerben via i-Installer 
that are NOT part of the TeXLive distribution.  Specifically I'm 
thinking of things like Ghostscript, Imagemagick, FontForge etc.  I 
assume that these are also going to disappear, yet (like Ghostscript) 
are important for a working TeX installation.  If this is true, then 
TeXLive is not the panacea that it is being made out to be in this 
discussion.

Or am I missing something?  When I first started to use TeX I did so 
using Fink because seemed to be the simplest way to install both TeX 
and its related utilities.  I've now weaned myself off of Fink and am 
happy with i-installer and the MikTeX package manager, but I don't 
relish the thought of having to chase around for every extra 
component and install it by hand.

Or am I missing something here?

Alan






-- 
Alan Munn 
amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics                             
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824       Tel.  +1-517-355-7491
------------------------- Info --------------------------
Mac-TeX Website: http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/
          & FAQ: http://latex.yauh.de/faq/
TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/faq
List Archive: http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/