[tex-live] TeX Live 2016 binaries status, and TeX Live 2016 reaches some Linux distributions

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I've made several reports on this list about building TeX Live 2016
binary distributions for numerous platforms.  The current state of
affairs is documented at

	http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive/
	 ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/texlive/

in the top-level README.html file.  That page reports today a total of
88 systems, among them CentOS 7 on IBM POWER8 little-endian, and GNU
Hurd on x86.

As I was running system updates on various machines today, I noticed
that TeX Live 2016 has finally reached some Linux distributions:

	Kali Linux 
	Debian 8-testing
	Debian 8-unstable

All are on x86-64, but presumably there are, or will soon be,
distributions for other supported CPUs.  On the Debian systems, I had
to do "apt-get dist-upgrade" to get the latest TeX Live.

I have several flavors of Ubuntu, which uses Debian-style packaging,
but the latest version, 16.04 LTS (Long-Term Support -- to 2021), is
still supplying TeX Live 2015.

CentOS 7 (and thus, Red Hat 7 and Scientific Linux 7), the latest
version in that popular distribution family, still has only TeX Live
2013.

For another popular platform with commercial support, openSUSE 13, and
42.1 supply only TeX Live 2013.  However, the latest release, openSUSE
TumbleWeed (rolling updates) has TeX Live 2015.

I conclude that, although a few of us developers are at the latest TeX
Live release, most of the (La)TeX users on the large installed based
of Linux systems are years behind.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
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