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...

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.