[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up

[Gerben Wierda]

On Nov 18, 2006, at 21:40 , Claus Gerhardt wrote:

> Themis remarks underline what I described previously as  
> rumours, ... These are carefully nurtured myths resulting in  
> brainwashing.

Words like myths and brainwashing do not help when you are trying to  
have a discussion on merits of various technical options or its  
history and the suggestions from those word are not very friendly.  
Having said that:

- Installing TeX Live via the install script is simple enough.  
However, I have had interaction with enough users over the year and  
anything involving the command line scares the hell out of them,  
independently from the fact if the install is actually simple or not
- TeX Live has never been an option for a dowloadable TeX until  
recently with the increase in bandwidth and it might still be only a  
valid download option for a minority. This will change of course.
- The situation in 2001-2003 was quite different from now. During  
that time, for instance, it was very important to keep up to date  
with the rapid development of (and bugfixes for) pdfTeX (especially  
on the Mac) and that meant that a way to update your binaries apart  
from the texmf tree was important.
- Nobody has ever steered people away from TeX Live on this list in  
my knowledge. I think I have personally told people about the TL  
option (on disc) if they wanted a lot more than what was in gwTeX.
- An initial install is not a big problem, even more so if the only  
thing you want to adapt is the paper size. Some people may remember  
the original TeXGSInstaller.app. The real complexity comes when  
people want to adapt, update, add to, and then update again. Or TeX  
goes haywire it seems but the problem turns out to be something else  
entirely (finding that out for people is also difficult and time  
consuming, especially at a distance).

G
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