alt Hacker News> And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles.
I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years. This has literally never happened to me. If that's not stability, I don't know what is. LaTeX documents I wrote in my grad days still compile for me. I just checked and it does. I do keep the dependency packages myself in my folder.
Has this issue ever happened to anyone? Why would LaTeX distribution getting updated break my documents? It's still the same latex compiler and the same base styles and packages!
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The only instance of a document not working right anymore for me was a really hacked book using an early/beta version of memoir --- there were (documented) breaking changes for the final release --- updated to match the new macro calls and it was back to working in short order.
> I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years
it gets annoying when you use LaTeX once a year for 25 years.
It happened to me because I had to use the templates and document classes provided by my university, which themselves rely on a bunch of packages I wouldn't have installed myself.
My next step was to just try doing the build in containers but I even ran into it there once because I accidentally pulled a newer image...
But it's just anecdotally. Maybe I really was holding it all wrong.