Need opinions on LaTeX and ever upgrading

Question

I've been using LaTeX since 2005 with the TeXLive distribution and I've been upgrading as each new TeXLive distribution comes out. In the recent years I noticed an increase in new packages, updated packages and in one instance a new package bearing a different name replacing an old one by the same package author. A LaTeX document which relies heavily on packages and which has been produced a few years back may start to get some warnings and error messages on present-day LaTeX compilation.

The primary reason I switched to LaTeX is because of its reliability and robustness to create big documents easily, not to mention the adorable typographic quality. With LaTeX one doesn't have to worry about how to open a docx in an old program supporting only doc for instance. Now, when there are so much continual changes in the packages in a LaTeX distribution, I tend to wonder when will this madness end. Not that having enhanced and new features are bad in packages, but not all updated packages are backward compatible. Eventually one would like to be able to compile a LaTeX file in 10 years time that he/she is working on at present and not get any compilation warnings/error messages due to some unpredictable behavior of updated packages or due to a package that has been cast-off from a LaTeX distribution. If I understand correctly CTAN do keep a database with all packages from different versions.

I would like to know how you LaTeX users handle this issue.

Thanks a lot...

Patten

community wiki (as far as I understand it, I am new here) means that this topic is meant as a discussion. You get less (no?) rewards from upvoting, but you encourage people to discuss and upvote good answers. You can mark a checkbox "community wiki" when creating a new question. – Ensoul

Thanks for the clarifications. I'm also new here :). – Patten

Answer 1

LaTeX itself is pretty stable. But you can't expect that the userland of LaTeX a) keeps up to date with current development (and bugfixes) and b) stays 100% compatible. That said, the LaTeX package authors are very conservative (and do not keep up to date with the current development - see LuaTeX for example - there are still very few LuaTeX aware packages). Pretty much in contrast to ConTeXt which is up to date with unicode, OpenType fonts, grid typesetting, etc.

I tend to keep old versions of TeXlive on my hard drive, as drives are getting bigger and bigger each year. But also (in your case), I'd rather keep my documents up to date, as the changes are probably very small and with help of your favorite search engine you get the correct syntax very fast.

Ensoul

Thanks. Yes LaTeX itself is indeed stable. It's a good idea to keep old versions of TeXLive on the computer. By keeping old versions, do u mean keeping the programs themselves active or keeping their iso files? Can we have concurrent TeXLive distributions? I guess that we can specify in the editor which version of TeX to use. – Patten

I am on a Unix system (Mac OS X), so this might not apply to all users here: I have setup my system so that I install TeXlive every time I get a new version in /opt/texlivexxxx where xxxxx is the year, for example /opt/texlive2005. Then I only set the PATH environment to that directory (more precise): the bin directory underneath). That way I am able to have multiple Installations in parallel. – Ensoul

I use Windows and I'm not sure how the environment variables will be able to cope with multiple TeXLive distributions. I've tried TL2009 but decided to go back to TL2008 as I was having problems making correct slides with the powerdot presentation package that comes with TL2009. Powerdot in TL2008 works all fine for me and now that I reverted to TL2008, I hope to stick to this distribution for some years to come... – Patten

I read somewhere that there's a package which lets you gather information about which packages and package versions that are being compiled with your LaTeX document. Book publishers use this technique in case an author wants to write a new edition of his/her book. The publisher can retrieve back all the old packages and TeX distribution used to make the earlier edition of the book and make changes for the new edition without much hassle. If only an ordinary LaTeX user could have access to such a system, it would be great. – Patten

I don't know. You can use \listfiles to find out the versions of the packages used. And you can use (never tried it, only heard of it) mylatex from David Carlisle. This sounds like what you need, but as I said, I have never used it. See tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/mylatex.html – Ensoul

Thanks for the info. I've heard of \listfiles but never of mylatex. I shall investigate this further. – Patten

@yCalleecharan: The default Texlive installation (i.e., when you install via make install) on UNIX-likes is to install to /usr/local/texlive/$YEAR), allowing many Texlives to coexist. – Graecize