[tex-live] auto-remove (was: Bidi is gone!?)

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 2013-04-02 at 18:32:25 +0200, Martin Schröder wrote:

 > 2013/4/2 Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at>:
 > > On Di, 02 Apr 2013, Herbert Voss wrote:
 > >> For TL 2013 can we please set "auto-remove" to false??
 > >
 > > I understand your request, but we are not happy with setting
 > > auto-remove to false. The reason is that *normally* packages
 > > are not removed, and removals are actually either renames,
 > > up superseeds. So disabling autor-remove will make it in
 > > *most* cases much worse for the users.
 > >
 > > I agree that it is not optimal, and maybe one *could* think about
 > > a way to distinguish these changes, but nothing the current
 > > infrastructur can handle, unfortunately.
 > 
 > Could we then please get an option during installation to set
 > auto-remove to false? And make auto-remove easily configurable from
 > the gui?
 > 
 > During the latest DANTE meeting a prominent member stated that he no
 > longer recommends or supports TL for his colleagues, as its
 > auto-remove makes its update break working installations "just because
 > someone somewhere did another license audit".

Martin, this is an understatement.
The said person compiles conference proceedings, 1000...2000 pages per
volume, from sources provided by hundreds of authors.  Of course, a
lot of difficulties can be avoided if everybody is using the same TeX
system.

But there's no reason to worry about deleted files.  If you really
want that everybody is using the same system, the only solution is to
install the ISO image and avoid updates.

If you update your system, there is absolutely no difference between
TeX Live and MiKTeX: your system changes daily.

If MiKTeX doesn't remove files which you're not allowed to use, don't
complain if they are removed from TeX Live.  I use TeX Live at work
and it's a requirement that everything I install there is legal.

The statement "just because someone somewhere did another license
audit" sounds like a joke.  Is it so hard to grok that I want to be
sure that everything I install on our server is legal?

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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