[NTG-context] The most Tex friendly distribution?

[Thomas A. Schmitz]

On Sep 18, 2008, at 7:30 AM, Peter Münster wrote:

> You're right, but I've to protect suse a bit: this was only an issue  
> with a
> very new MKIV (new logic how to use TEXINPUTS), and suse could  
> really not
> know about that. TEXINPUTS was quite useful, because every user  
> could put
> his own personal directory in it, and there did not need to be an ls-R
> file.
>
> Cheers, Peter

Well, no offense, I used to be a big fan of SuSE myself (still like it  
a lot, but their package manager really needs work). But: I just  
double-checked, and TEXINPUTS is still set on my 11.0 system - even  
though I don't have any SuSE-provided TeX-system installed. That's  
really unpardonable. I can understand why they want to set it for  
their own TeXLive packages, but not on a virgin system without any TeX  
component. For an inexperienced user who wants to install TeXLive from  
DVD or via the net installer, this will be a major obstacle. So I  
think the point remains valid: SuSE is not a TeX-friendly distribution.

Thomas