[tex-live] Why such an old version of enumitem

[Michael A. Peters]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Brett Presnell a écrit :
>> I have what is distributed by default with the very latest release of
>> Ubuntu (and hence of Debian as well), but you're right, it looks like
>> it's a 2007 version.  This is a bit surprising to me since the current
>> version of Ubuntu (8.10, "Intrepid Ibis") was released in October of
>> 2008 (hence the 8.10).  They freeze the packages a few months earlier,
>> but still ...
>>
> I assume the Ubuntu TeX Live packages are more or less directly taken
> from the Debian packages. And TL'08 is still not packaged in Debian,
> mainly (I suppose, after what I read in the Debian TeX mailing list, but
> Norbert will be able to give more details) due to lack of time of the
> developpers, and maybe the Debian timeline with the upcoming release of
> Lenny.

That's probably correct.
I run CentOS and Fedora and I generally prefer to use the vendor 
provided packages whenever possible, and when the vendor does not 
provide packages, I tend to package the software myself via RPM - so 
that it is linked against the vendor provided library versions.

However, LaTeX Live is a different story. IMHO LaTeX should NOT be under 
vendor package management but should be installed from the TeX Live 
installer in /opt/texlive (or in /usr/local/texlive). This avoids the 
need to reinstall with an OS update (assuming /opt is a separate 
partition as it should be) and allows fresh versions to be installed.

It does cause a minor issue. For example, the emacs-auctex RPM package 
will depend upon the Fedora TeX packaging. This is resolved by a dummy 
package.

I actually create a user/group called texlive that owns the texlive 
installation and have a few wrapper scripts for when an rpm wants to run 
texhash or updmap as root.

If anyone is interested in my rpm spec file, mail me off list. I'm 
guessing a very similar thing could be done with ubuntu/debian but I 
have zero knowledge of how their packaging system works.

The reason I like to keep LaTeX outside of RPM control is because every 
update to TeXLive (IE 2007 to 2008) something changes with the memoir 
class that requires me to update projects to get them to succesfully 
compile. Keeping TeXLive outside of the package manager makes it easier 
to have multiple versions installed.

For example, to compile something in TeX Live 2004 I symply need to do

export PATH=/opt/texlive/2004/bin/i386-linux:$PATH

The only hitch - sometimes after an OS upgrade, you need to install a 
few old shared libraries in order for old versions of TeX Live to 
continue to function. That usually isn't too much of a problem. Anyway - 
it means that if several years from now, I need to update a project 
originally done in TL 2008 - I can do so without needing to figure out 
what broke when trying to do it in TL 2012 and how the changes to make 
it compile impact the typesetting. If I haven't ported my source to TL 
2012 yet then I can update an old project without needing to.

Anyway, I do suggest using the TeX Live installer for TeX Live rather 
than OS vendor packages.