This CD-ROM distribution is a joint effort by many TeX Users Groups, including those from Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France, the Czech Republic/Slovakia, India, Poland and Russia, as well as the international TUG. Discussion began in late 1993 when the Dutch TeX Users Group was starting work on its 4AllTeX CD-ROM for MS-DOS users, and it was hoped at that time to issue a single, rational, CD-ROM for all systems. This was far too ambitious a target, but it did spawn not only the very successful 4AllTeX CD-ROM, but also the TUG Technical Council working group on a TeX Directory Structure, which specified how to create consistent and manageable collections of TeX support files. The final draft of the TDS was published in the December 1995 issue of TUGboat, and it was clear from an early stage that one desirable product would be a model structure on CD-ROM. The CD-ROM you now have is a very direct result of the working group’s deliberations. It was also clear that the success of the 4AllTeX CD-ROM showed that Unix users would benefit from a similarly easy system, and this is the other main strand of TeX Live.
We undertook to make a new Unix-based TDS CD-ROM in the autumn of 1995, and quickly identified Thomas Esser’s teTeX as the ideal setup, as it already had multi-platform support and was built with portability across file systems in mind. Thomas agreed to help, and work began seriously at the start of 1996. The first edition was released in May 1996. At the start of 1997, Karl Berry completed a major new release of his Web2c package, which included nearly all the features which Thomas Esser had added in teTeX, and we decided to base the 2nd edition of the CD-ROM on the standard Web2c, with the addition of teTeX’s texconfig script. The 3rd edition of the CD-ROM was based on a major revision of Web2c, 7.2, by Olaf Weber; at the same time, a new revision of teTeX was being made, and TeX Live shares almost all of its features. The 4th edition followed the same pattern, using a new version of teTeX, and a new release of Web2c (7.3). The system now included a complete Windows setup.
For the 5th edition (March 2000) many parts of the CD-ROM were revised and checked, updating hundreds of packages. Package details were stored in XML files. But the major change for TeX Live 5 was that all non-free software was removed. Everything on this CD-ROM should be compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (http://www.debian.org/intro/free); we have done our best to check the license conditions of all packages, but we would very much appreciate hearing of any mistakes.
The 6th edition (July 2001) had a lot material updated. The major change was a new install concept: the user could select a more exact set of needed collections. Language-related collections were completely reorganized, so selecting any of them installs not only macros, fonts, etc., but also prepares an appropriate language.dat.
The 7th edition of 2002 had as a major addition a setup for MacOSX, and the usual myriad of updates to all sorts of packages and programs. An important goal was integration of the source back with teTeX, to correct the drift apart in versions 5 and 6.