2021-11-10 –, Room 2
The TeX environment has grown slowly but steadily to a huge collection of programs, fonts, macros, support packages. Current TeX Live ships about 5Gb in more than 3500 different units. As teTeX stopped to be developed several years ago, TeX Live has taken over as the main TeX distribution in practical all areas, not only on Unix, but also Mac (MacTeX is based on TeX Live) and is also gaining on Windows (where MikTeX is still strong).
In this talk we recall shortly the history of TeX Live, its transition from CD/DVD based distribution to net based distribution, and the difficulties one faces when distributing a considerable piece of software to a variety of operating systems and hardware combinations (currently about 15 different arch-os combinations). Topics touched are cross-platform distribution, security, release management etc.
Furthermore, we will discuss the topic of re-distributing TeX Live into Linux distributions like Debian, Red Hat. Integrating TeX Live into any distribution is a non-trivial task due to big amount of post installation steps. And although over the last years the quality of packages has improved, we still often get bug reports that stem from incorrect packaging.
Mathematician and Logician by education, Norbert is now working in Fujitsu Research. His core interests are mathematical logic, computer science, machine learning, AI, security, software verification and specification. He is also the co-head of the TeX Live development team, Debian Developer (KDE/Plasma, Cinnamon, TeX, ...) and likes to touch all kind of computing devices.