[OS X TeX] Finally we are grown up

[Philipp Mathey]

On 21-Nov-06, at 1:16 PM, Jeffrey Weimer wrote:
>
> IMO, a distinguishing feature of supporting a software package and   
> "supporting" (ie, in words only) a software package is the ability  
> to  answer properly even the most banal requests for help. It is  
> akin to  the process of helping children understand something so  
> they can grow  up and be truly functional adults.


you do realize that Gerben Wierda, Claus Gerhard, Bruno Voisin and
everyone else on this list offer their advice/support/solutions for  
free ?
It is not like you  bought some software and now you are entitled
to customer support. That would be the case if one bought Textures.

>
> Whoever picks up the path from here (if you are listening in),  
> please  do not forget, people such as me do exist. We like LaTeX  
> alot, we  want to use LaTeX as much as possible on our MacOS X  
> systems, and we  still get a bit anxious about being asked to mess  
> around at the shell/ Applescript/... levels just to be able to work  
> with LaTeX.

I agree.


Eventually I also would prefer an application like i-installer (with  
a GUI)
which can be installed from a disk image and which makes installing
TeX and TeX-related software really easy. In the meantime,  isn't it
good that some people try to begin thinking about the future ?
As fas as I can see, Claus Gerhard simply provided a recipe
  for installing TeXLive, as a start. Some details have to be ironed  
out.
That's the whole point of this list. Eventually better, more user- 
friendly
solutions will be found, I hope.

Also, the TeX i-package provides a perfectly functional TeX
on MacOsX now and in the near future. No one is
forced to switch to TeXLive right now. In 3-4 months from now
it will still be perfectly usable. The only problem will be that it  
won't
be updated anymore, i.e. the current setup will slowly become
outdated, starting in January. So, what we should hope for is that
within the next 3-4 months an equally user-friendly alternative
will become available.


Btw, Gerben Wierda is Dutch, I think.



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