I've been a debian woody user for a long time, now, and the conclusion I eventually came to was this:
* debian's strict adherence to directory structure conventions has made the tetex package difficult to maintain, since it's split into many parts, spread all over the filesystem. (This is really just an inference of mine.)
The nice thing about tex is that it is quite well organized (in its own tree) and splitting it up over many places makes it a pain to maintain; for instance, do the debian people offer extensive cleanup-remove scripts? I wonder how the tex community is supposed to provide support to users if all redistributers would change the tex tree organization to their needs.
* context has never worked for me in debian, and
submitting a bug report looks hopeless, given the
long length of the bug list. I haven't checked
in a long time, though.
* I wasn't able to use the "equivs" package to get
the debian packaging system to accept my own tetex
installation, so I could not install, e.g., the
docbook-xsl-st package.
* finally, I settled on this: install the debian
tetex packages but don't use them directly. Also
install teTeX from source in /opt, and set my
PATH so that when I say texexec I get the real
tetex and not debian's broken tetex.
what i do here is the following:
(1) when a new tex live arrives, i copy this to /tex/texmf (2) i keep my local context + some fonts in /tex/texmf-local (3) i put all new fonts (mostly commercial) in /tex/texmf-fonts (4) i put all the binaries in /tex/texmf-linux/bin|web2c
(so, i also have texmf-mswin, texmf-darwin, etc)
if needed in project, i also have a /tex/texmf-project
I have set up texmf.cnf as well as cont-sys.tex set up in the texmf-local tree to enable metapost processing
Finally I get rid of all the os specific settings and hook these trees into the whole:
btw 1, in most cases i just use TEXROOT=/tex
btw 2, i also have a minimal 50 meg main texmf tree which makes tex run much faster
so, i use tex live (tetex,fptex) as basis and not the linux distributers alternative
# . setuptex # mktexlsr # texexec --make --alone
TEXROOT=/usr/local/tex export TEXROOT
TEXMFMAIN=$TEXROOT/texmf TEXMFLOCAL=$TEXROOT/texmf-local TEXMFFONTS=$TEXROOT/texmf-fonts TEXMFPROJECT=$TEXROOT/texmf-project TEXMFOS=$TEXROOT/texmf-linux VARTEXMF=$TEXROOT/texmf-var
export TEXMFMAIN export TEXMFLOCAL export TEXMFPROJECT export TEXMFFONTS export TEXMFOS export VARTEXMF
PATH=$TEXMFOS/bin:$PATH export PATH
HOMETEXMF= export HOMETEXMF
# the next lines fail on dec alpha os's, so there you need # to comment them (bug traced down by kees van marle/martin # corrino) # # HOMETEXMF=/nonexist # export HOMETEXMF
TEXMFCNF=$TEXROOT/texmf{-local,}/web2c
TEXMF='{$TEXMFOS,$TEXMFPROJECT,$TEXMFFONTS,$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}'
TEXFORMATS=$TEXMFOS/web2c
TEXPOOL=$TEXFORMATS
MPPOOL=$TEXFORMATSexport TEXMFCNF export TEXMF export TEXFORMATS export TEXPOOL export MPPOOL
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