Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76748
Component versions in tetex packages are lagging
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:47:57 EDT
Description of Problem: Red Hat is too conservative for its own good with versions of software in tetex packages. For example, in spite of recent updates dvips is 5.86 from 1999. The current one is 5.92a and includes various fixes in particular for partial fonts downloading and support of Type42 fonts. (bundled with the current tetex sources - see dviware/dvips/README on CTAN). For further examples LaTeX is 2000/06/01 version. Current texlive7-20020604 (on CTAN, under tex-archive/systems/texlive/) includes 2001/06/01 coordinated and required with an up-to-date version of babel (internationalization support). Texlive7 also sports 3.14159-1.00b-pretest-20020211 of pdftex, Linux binaries also provided :-), while Red Hat tetex packages still have 3.14159-14h-released-20010417. At least not that really buggy old version which languished in Red Hat distributions for way too long. Yes, I know about "pretest" but authors seem to be slow and overcautious and newer versions are available ( on CTAN in tex-archive/systems/web2c/web2c-7.3.8-pdftex* ).
Upgrading every single little tiny component is just too hard, and historically we've shipped things like the Japanese patches which don't tend to get ported very quickly. I look forward to the next actual teTeX release, due "this year".