another spin of TeX Live 2009 packages

[Jonathan Underwood]

2009/8/31 Patrice Dumas <pertusus at free.fr>:
> Hello,
>
> I haven't followed closely the new packaging of texlive, so you should
> take my comments with caution...
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 01:15:21PM +0200, Jindrich Novy wrote:
>>
>> The new packages obsolete the ancient tetex stuff:
>> tetex-tex4ht
>
> I think that the stand-alone tex4ht could be better than the texlive one.
> It was updated many time a year in the past (but it may change).
>
>> tetex-elvevier
>
> In the past, the version in CTAN of this package used to lag a lot. I'd
> still advise taking the files from the web, especially since there is also
> the old style in the stand-alone package.
>
>> and these utilities:
>> dvipdfm
>> dvipdfmx
>> dvipng
>> xdvi
>> xdvipdfmx
>
> Haven't some of those an upstream different from texlive?

They do - however I lean towards using ones that come from texlive
though, so we benefit from the integration work the TeXLive developers
do. Once we start down the road of packaging everything with another
upstream separately we get closer to basically developing out own TeX
distribution, and we don't have the manpower to do that. A purest
approach wouldn't consume the class files and packages from TeXLive
either, but would rather take the .dtx files etc from ctan. Clearly
this would be crazy. I think it's fair to regard TeXLive as upstream -
in most cases the other upstreams are more like development sandboxes.

Jonathan (who presently maintains or comaintains most of those
packages at the mo).