10 Last words

This edition of TeX Live is edited by Sebastian Rahtz, with the major contributors being Fabrice Popineau, who has worked away unceasingly at the Windows part of the package (especially the setup!) and contributed in many different ways with ideas, advice and code, and Staszek Wawrykiewicz, who provided great testing feedback, and co-ordinated the Polish contributions.

Kaja Christiansen performed a vital role in endless recompilations on assorted Unix platforms. Vladimir Volovich did great work on cleaning the source and making other improvements, while Gerben Wierda did all the work for Mac OS X.

10.1 Acknowledgements

TeX Live is a joint effort by virtually all TeX Users Groups. In particular, we are very grateful for past and present help from:

In addition, Gerhard Wilhelms, Volker Schaa, Fabrice Popineau, Janka Chlebíková, Staszek Wawrykiewicz, Erik Frambach, and Ulrik Vieth kindly translated documentation at various times into their respective languages, checked other documentation, and provided very welcome feedback.

10.2 Release history

Discussion began in late 1993 when the Dutch TeX Users Group was starting work on its 4AllTeX CD for MS-DOS users, and it was hoped at that time to issue a single, rational, CD for all systems. This was too ambitious a target for the time, but it did spawn not only the very successful 4AllTeX CD, but also the TUG Technical Council working group on a TeX Directory Structure (http://tug.org/tds), which specified how to create consistent and manageable collections of TeX support files. A complete draft of the TDS was published in the December 1995 issue of TUGboat, and it was clear from an early stage that one desirable product would be a model structure on CD. The distribution you now have is a very direct result of the working group’s deliberations. It was also clear that the success of the 4AllTeX CD showed that Unix users would benefit from a similarly easy system, and this is the other main strand of TeX Live.

We first undertook to make a new Unix-based TDS CD in the autumn of 1995, and quickly identified Thomas Esser’s teTeX as the ideal setup, as it already had multi-platform support and was built with portability across file systems in mind. Thomas agreed to help, and work began seriously at the start of 1996. The first edition was released in May 1996. At the start of 1997, Karl Berry completed a major new release of Web2c, which included nearly all the features which Thomas Esser had added in teTeX, and we decided to base the 2nd edition of the CD on the standard Web2C, with the addition of teTeX’s texconfig script. The 3rd edition of the CD was based on a major revision of Web2C, 7.2, by Olaf Weber; at the same time, a new revision of teTeX was being made, and TeX Live included almost all of its features. The 4th edition followed the same pattern, using a new version of teTeX, and a new release of Web2C (7.3). The system now included a complete Windows setup.

For the 5th edition (March 2000) many parts of the CD were revised and checked, updating hundreds of packages. Package details were stored in XML files. But the major change for TeX Live 5 was that all non-free software was removed. Everything in TeX Live is now intended to be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/intro/free); we have done our best to check the license conditions of all packages, but we would very much appreciate hearing of any mistakes.

The 6th edition (July 2001) had much more material updated. The major change was a new install concept: the user could select a more exact set of needed collections. Language-related collections were completely reorganized, so selecting any of them installs not only macros, fonts, etc., but also prepares an appropriate language.dat.

The 7th edition of 2002 had the notable addition of Mac OS X support, and the usual myriad of updates to all sorts of packages and programs. An important goal was integration of the source back with teTeX, to correct the drift apart in versions 5 and 6.

In 2003, with the continuing flood of updates and additions, we found that TeX Live had grown so large it could no longer be contained on a single CD, so we split it into three different distributions (see section 2.1 on p. 10). In addition:

10.3 Future releases

TeX Live is not perfect! (And never will be.) We intend to continue to release new versions yearly, and would like to provide more help material, more utilities, more installation programs, and (of course) an ever-improved and checked tree of macros and fonts. This work is all done by hard-pressed volunteers in their limited spare time, and a great deal remains to be done. If you can help, don’t hesitate to put your name forward!

Please send corrections, suggestions, and offers of help to:

Sebastian Rahtz  /  7 Stratfield Road  /  Oxford OX2 7BG  /  UK
tex-live@tug.org
http://tug.org/texlive

Happy TeX’ing!