[tex-live] newalg

Victor Ivrii vivrii at gmail.com
Sun Oct 5 17:43:09 CEST 2008


On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 10:42 AM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Victor Ivrii <vivrii at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Actually I am more concerned with packages which are discovered to be
>> non-free and are removed from TL. Experimental version of TL really
>> removes packages and in any Math Dept (or similar structures) one can
>> find at least couple of users with the very small knowledge and very
>> large aplomb who would tear apart system manager if some package they
>> use suddenly disappears (as our sysadmin tells it is enough that they
>> come with "You modified something and the file we processed before
>> cannot be processed anymore!!! No, no, we modified nothing, it was
>> YOU!!!" -- then he restores from backup and diff shows that these guys
>> really modified their files". My esteemed colleagues go away grudging
>> something like "Next time we will get you")
>
> i don't imagine you keep your sysadmins very long...  (it's not an
> environment i would care to work in.  user lunacy is bad enough here, in
> a computer science department, but malicious lunacy is just too much.)
>
> for all that, it's good practice to announce when you're going to change
> the tex system (or any other system) other people's feet.  (if possible,
> announce the upcoming change, having made the system available on a test
> machine so that interested parties can experiment, and after the change,
> leave an old system available that users can check things on.  this sort
> of thing is quite easy nowadays, with virtualisation technology.)
>
> robin
>
>

I am in Math Dept where everybody uses LaTeX (some still use 209) even
if a significant number of my esteemed colleagues cannot switch
computer on without few unsuccessful attempts. Those who heard about
existence of texdoc are considered to be geeks. Dept is full of smart
people who are sooo smart that they never read stupid manuals or even
more stupid messages from sysadmins. This is why systadmins asked me
to take care of texlive (they know that I can always answer "I cannot
imagine why any intelligent human being need this stupid package but
TeXperts like you can always instal it into your own TDS tree" :-)


-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii


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