Accessibility and ease of use

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi all,

maybe I forgot to write that it is even more difficult. I had a
running software and then I upgraded Fedora. After upgrade the SW
ceased to work. I found that the maintainers decided to put
Time::Local into a package which is not installed as default, I had to
install it. The same happened with some octave functions which were
moved to packages no longer installed as default. Fedora upgrades are
available twice a year which means that things may cease to work
within the life time of TL distro and installation of Fedora packages
can be needed. TL maintainers do not know tne names of the packages in
all distros. If you need a perl module, you can ask "apt-cache search"
in Debian based distros, "yum search" in CentOS, "dnf search" in
Fedora, I do not know other distros. The output is human readable but
not easily parseable.

The remedy would be not to use perl-based SW in TeX Live but rewrite
all scripts to lua which is supplied with TL. I know that it needs a
lot of time and (wo)man-power so it will not happen soon.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml

pá 18. 3. 2022 v 9:03 odesílatel Markus Kohm <komascript at gmx.info> napsal:
>
> Am Donnerstag, 17. März 2022, 21:32:58 CET schrieb Jonathan Fine:
> > Again on the tex-live list Norbert Preining replied that on Unix "It is the
> > user's responsibility to provide a working perl, and necessary modules for
> > the programs one uses."
>
> And this is always correct for Linux. If a user does not use the package
> manager of the Linux distribution s:he is always responsible for the
> requirements. So users who have problems in resolving all requirements should
> use the package manager of the Linux distro. And yes, they should also know,
> that TeX Live for most Linux distros is not a single package and if they want
> the whole thing, they have to install the whole thing. And because of this
> some knowledge in using the package manager(s) of the linux distribution would
> help. But this is nothing special for TeX Live. It is usual for several
> applications. So it is something, Linux users should know generally. User who
> do not, will have problems sooner or later.
>
> Just a note: Several Linux distros also provide alternative package managers
> for docker, flatpack, snap etc.  So there are even more alternatives than
> either using the native package manager of the linux distro (with the current
> release repository or even an experimental one) or using a kind of manual
> vanilla installation.
>
> Markus