On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:33:04PM +0200, b.n. wrote:
> ehm, I guess I wasn't clear.
> You *already* knew:
> - That there are texlive and tetex
> - That tetex was EOLed and texlive was the next choice
> - That tetex and texlive are mutually exclusive
> - That the ebuild was in the tree

Oh.. that...

> I knew, instead:
> - You want to install latex, this usually pushes down tetex. I always
> had tetex, on Gentoo and non-Gentoo distros, and I didn't ask myself
> anything about texlive.
> - I even *didn't know* there is texlive.
> - I didn't certainly know tetex was into problems: was there a
> widespread announcement of that *for people not following tetex
> development*?

tetex was not running into problems. tetex has almost always been a
one man act, and the maintainer, who, after over a decade of
maintaining bug fixes and what-nots, finally decided that he has no
more time and no longer cares enough. And he pulled through until a
viable alternative was available.

> - Knowing nothing about what tetex, texlive etc. are, I even could
> expect that they could happily live together (e.g., if they are two
> implementations of tex, that one could eselect one or the other. Naive,
> but why not?)
> - Knowing nothing about texlive, I couldn't know there was its ebuild.

The best thing to do would be to ask here, I think. Of course, that
leads to the problem of you not knowing that a question ought to be
asked to start with...

> Furthermore, kudos to your prudence: seeing a lot of use flags never
> raised me thoughts like "it must be complicated": it just lets me think
> "whoa, lots of nice options!".

Thanks for the compliment.

> Apart from this last point, that may just me being dense, where was that
> knowledge announced? Was it in the GMN (in that case, my fault)? Is
> there something else that I should regularly check for stuff like that?
> (another thing was the expat upgrade, which I understood was troublesome
> only from posts on this ML).  I am subscribed to gentoo-announce, but
> there only a huge mass of GLSA are usually posted. What news source am I
> missing? Since it's 4 years I use Gentoo, I feel quite sad about that...

Let's just say I have an exceptionally good memory. The death of tetex
was announced about two years ago
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20060612-newsletter.xml
and I know I also saw that fact somewhere on /. (perhaps not an
article but a comment). After I saw the announcements, I went to
http://www.tug.org/tetex/
where, the first thing they (I mean, Thomas Esser) say is that "I
suggest ... TeX Live project".

But, I agree, unless you are a tex junkie (like me) or an obsessive
reader of GMN/GWN (like me also) you may not have heard the news.

W
--
Willie W. Wong                         wwong@(protected)
408 Fine Hall, Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton
A mathematician's reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given.
--
gentoo-user@(protected)