> What is the difference between the two latex implementations available
> under debian?

tetex is older, abandoned upstream (and upstream author suggests its user to switch to texlive), and slightly smaller. TeXLive is community maintained (by different TUG groups), much bigger, much more platform independent (not much of interest for us, but you get support on Windows, Mac, and all possible Unices).

Matej Cepl

http://www.tug.org/pipermail/tugindia/2005-June/003454.html

TeXlive versus teTeX. Norbert Preining [22]announced to package TeXlive, one of the most complete TeX systems. The advantage of TeXlive is a more fine-grained package structure, while teTeX would still be around and could make use of TeXlive modules. Frank Kster [23]explained that both packages are well maintained but use a different style.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/06/msg01103.html

>> * Package name    : texlive
>>   Description     : The TeXlive system packaged for debian
>>
>> TeX Live is an easy way to get up and running with TeX. It includes all
>> major freely-available TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts,
>> including support for many languages around the world.
>
> The website looks like that's a "live" tex CD. What's the difference
> to a normal "apt-get install tetex-extra" installation on Debian?

Let me add some comments from my point of view (Debian teTeX maintainer). There is a significant difference between texlive and teTeX, and I think that Debian users, as well as developers, will benefit from texlive being packaged.

First of all, texlive is much more comprehensive than teTeX, it contains virtually the complete CTAN archive as far as the software is DFSG-free (yes, the texlive team specifically uses the DFSG), whereas teTeX contains only a subset of the more popular - or more traditional, in some cases - (La)TeX packages.

Second, texlive has a very elaborate structure of subpackages that allow to install exactly what you need, whereas teTeX is one monolithic piece of data, and has been split into -bin, -base, -extra, and -doc only by the Debian maintainers. And this splitting is by no means satisfying; people always asked for finer splitting, but this is hard to do, and in fact parts of -extra should be put back into -base because they belong to a LaTeX Base Distribution.

Finally, texlive has a promised, and, as far as I know, always fulfilled release schedule of "once per year", whereas teTeX is released not only "when it is ready", but also "when the upstream author has time and thinks it is necessary".

Taking things together, I think that texlive will be the much better choice for users who install a TeX system on their home box to actually write LaTeX (or ConTeXt) documents, and who perhaps use testing, anyway. On the other hand, an admin on a multi-user box might better stick to teTeX, and specifically for the buildd's teTeX will provide a more conservative environment.

Frank

Adrian von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> wrote:

> On Monday 13 June 2005 09.41, frank wrote:
> [texlive vs. teTeX]
>> Let me add some comments from my point of view (Debian teTeX
>> maintainer).
>
> Sounds like packaging texlive and trying to get it really stable would be
> the thing to do, with the goal of phasing out teTeX for etch+1
>
> Not becuase I don't value your work, Frank, but from what you said it sounds
> like texlive is a better maintained superset of teTeX - or are there
> reasons why somebody specifically would want to stick to teTeX (assuming a
> transition plan etc. etc. to solve "all" Debian/packaging specific issues.)

TeX-Live exists for a couple of years now, and while it might gain some teTeX users, teTeX upstream is by no means dead. So for these users, there must be a reason to use teTeX. I don't know these reasons; but one might be that with teTeX you get a TeX system that contains all the essential stuff without much bloat. You can have the same with tex-live, by selecting and deselecting the appropriate sub-packages (binary packages when provided by Debian). But personally I find it easier to start with teTeX's choices and add some specific packages from CTAN if I really need them.

I also wouldn't say that tex-live is better maintained. It's just the style that differs: A team effort with a yearly release schedule for tex-live, the work of one very experienced TeX guru for teTeX (who bases his decisions more on the development of TeX tools and programs than on the release schedule of Debian, that's why I made that remark about "releasing when he thinks it is time"). By the way, Thomas Esser and the tex-live team work closely together, and for sure he has quite some influence on them; but as long as he does not stop teTeX, I see no reason for us to stop it.

One other thing is that texlive's focus is on personal computers - Windows, Mac, and i386-Linux, while teTeX is a distribution for UNIX-like operating systems. I'm not an architecture expert, but I can imagine that there might be issues in the sources that can be solved in a satisfying way _either_ for i386-Linux, Mac, and Windows, _or_ for GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd, Whatever/Unixoid (all on a variety of different architectures). In this case we might be glad to have teTeX packages for all (released and however-they-are-called) architectures, not just texlive for a small subset, or alternatively a hell of patches.

Regards, Frank