Comment 5 for bug 905328

@Sergio

I mostly agree with your comments, and I would be the first to try out a PPA on the likes of your proposal (I am quite lazy myself :). But I still feel that a PPA like that does not belong to the main repository, just like in so many other cases. Do you see a new official ppa for every new version of say LibreOffice, which has admittedly a significantly larger audience?

For a PPA to make it into the main repositories, it needs to be well tested to make sure it works not just in the developers' computers, but in the large and diverse user base. Just wrapping around an installer and creating a ppa doesn't help much, not unless the packages are tested... That on its own is a huge undertaking (~3GB of packages), and is the min reason TeXLive lags behind to begin with.

Anyway, considering your comment #5, indeed I would agree TeXLive users should be statistically biased towards the technically skilled side (most linux users really), and installing an up-to-date version through the TeXLive installer shouldn't be that much of a problem.

I for one have tried it twice or thrice, and unfortunately it never worked... I always had issues with kpathsea, so effectively I couldn't even compile trivially simple .tex files... And I would spend hours searching the internet for solutions, trying things in the command line, messing up my fonts cache. By that time I would have greatly passed the point of even considering manual installation a problem.

You see, that is my point, the installer might work for you and most other users, but TeXLive is really really hard to test and make sure it is going to work (even the fundamentals) in virtually all users. And if it doesn't, if installing it manually feels difficult then fixing the problem should feel impossible.

If however you still insist on your initial view, let me know so I can revert the status change of your bug report.