On Aug 20, 2010, at 7:33 AM, Jürgen Spitzmüller wrote: > Sure. But you lose one of the most important features of TeXLive: immediate > update to the most recent packages from CTAN.
I think it really depends on your needs. The question for the user becomes, how often do you really need to update your LaTeX distribution? Given its maturity and the high quality of the original packages, I've found the answer is: not very often (at least for me). For example, I just recently updated to TexLive 2009 on my main Ubuntu workstation. For years, only TeXLive 2007 was available as part of the package repositories, so I used it. In all that time, there was only one time that I needed a newer copy of a package and couldn't find a workaround. Sure TeXLive included a bunch of benefits, but I'd be pretty hard-pressed to name one that I take advantage of frequently. In fact, without referring to the change-log, I'd be pretty hard pressed to name any at all (updated Tufte classes that correctly number margin figures might be one). For this reason, up to the second versions of LaTeX packages aren't really all that important to me. If the releases were packaged once per year, I think that's more than enough for my needs (and I would argue for the needs of most other users). But the three years that it took to update TeXLive 2007 to TexLive 2009 was probably too long. Though I didn't notice any practical need, there was a psychological need. It's important to feel like your software is maintained, and going such a long time between updates made TeXLive on Debian feel abandoned. (As a caveat, I'd like the ability to download needed packages on the fly (like MikTeX allows), but I am willing to forego that particular nicety for the convenience of a single packaging tool.) So, though i largely agree with your recommendation, I would attach on addendum. For novice LaTeX/LyX users, I would recommend staying with the default packages. For more advanced users that are comfortable with managing their own LaTeX installations, going upstream makes a lot of sense. As someone earlier in this thread said, I wonder if it would be worth packaging a version of LyX for this particular demographic. I wouldn't make it the default, but we could easily set up a PPA (in addition to Red Hat/Open SuSe equivalents) and post installation instructions somewhere on the website. If an advanced user is willing to set up a custom LaTeX distribution, surely they are motivated enough to seek out LyX options that don't require system packages? Just my two cents, though. Cheers, Rob
