Annual upgrade

[Markus Kohm]

Am Donnerstag, 28. März 2024, 12:18:20 CET schrieb Jonathan Fine:
> For me the most important thing Patrick said is "I just wanted to point out
> how complex the whole operation is, and how this complexity can put users
> off."
> 
> I applaud this sentiment.

I've installed TeX Live more than 100 times. I can remember two problems. One 
was with the prerelease and therefore is not relevant for most users. Over the 
years, I have had several connections timeouts, while installation, because of 
a very fragile internet connections for several years. But almost ever I could 
just run the installer again to complete the installation. I remember that in 
only one case I needed to remove /usr/local/texlive/YYYY and just start the 
whole installation again. That's it.

In the same time there were more problems in installing or updating Linux and 
much more problems in updating Windows. (I know this is a comparison of 
peaches and apples, but there was already a comparison with apt before.)

TeX Live installation is absolutely easy. Most stability problems, I read 
about, are, because user do something very unusual or try to install/update 
(whatever) while the mirror also does rsync. But the last problem means only: 
Either use another mirror or wait some minutes. And it is not really a TeX 
Live problem.

So I also applaud, but I applaud the excellent and even free work of all the 
TeX Live contributors, who are involved in making a new release every year.