This talk presents the advances of TeX Live since the 2008 release
which introduced a complete new infrastructure. This brought several
changes and enhancements not only for the developers of TeX Live,
but also for the users of TeX Live. The following topics will be
discussed:
* The new infrastructure
Up to TeX Live 2007 the package management of TeX Live was quite a
pain as the package descriptions (tpm files) contained a mix of
static and generated content. Furthermore, many information
occurring in these files where duplicates from other sources like
the TeX Catalogue. The new infrastructure creates a strict
separation of static content and automatically generated content.
Furthermore, it introduces a new package description (the
TeX Live Database) which is a plain text file.

* Getting things into TeX Live
Anything on CTAN which has a free license could possibly included
in TeX Live. But the format of packages on CTAN is most often far
from being in a TDS compliant layout. Since years we are working
and improving a script that re-packages stuff from CTAN into a
TDS compliant layout for inclusion into TeX Live. Paralleling that
we developped scripts to check that our repository is uptodate.

* The (not so new) installer -- a user's view
Using the new infrastructure the old text mode installer has been
rewritten in Perl, making it thus platform independent. It can
be run on all supported platforms. In addition to the text mode
installer a GUI (graphical user interface) for the installer has
been added that also is available for all supported platforms.
Lately a wizard installation has been added to make installation
even simpler.

* The TeX Live Manager -- a user's view
Extending and taking over the texconfig program which has only been
present on Unix, the TeX Live Manager now manages all parts of the
TeX Live installation. Most importantly, the update of packages
over the network. Besides that it allows searching of files and
packages' descriptions and many other features. It features a
GUI that exhibits most functionality of the command line program
in a graphical way (but not all).

* Internals of the TeX Live Database and the TeX Live Manager
This part is a bit more technical as it presents the TeX Live Database
and how we store the various bits and pieces of configuration options
in the database.

* Other news
- LuaTeX, the new engine
LuaTeX is developed as a successor and extension of pdftex which
embedds a Lua interpreter. Besides the fact that it will a allow
a much more fine grained control on all aspects of the engine,
layout, fonts etc, it allows scripting in a Lua with built in
support for quering details of the engine and the installation.
- introduction of TeXworks for Windows
The new editor/frontend TeXworks which lowers the entrance
barrier and provides a nice interface and many advanced
features has been shipped now for W32 in TeX Live.
- reworked hyphenation patterns, support for etex
XeTeX and LuaTeX only accept UTF8 hyphenation patterns. Up to now
the patterns of various languages have been present in a variety
of encodings and formats. Based on the hyph-utf8 package the
hyphenation patterns in TeX Live are now completely UTF8 based,
which allows supporting the same set of languages in all the
eTeX, pdftex, XeTeX based formats. Furthermore, the hyphenation
patterns are also automatically configured for the e-TeX engine.
- included Windows programs
Besides the already well known Windows support programs and the
dviout DVI previewer, we have added a new program ps_view which
is a free, fast, extremely versatile and powerful PostScript and
PDF viewer.
- updates to other programs
The usual bunch of updates to all included programs.

* Further development
As it is with everything in the TeX World, nothing is finished here.
The TeX Live infrastructure will continue to evolve, adding new
features on the way. We shortly will discuss planned enhancements
to the infrastructure and espcially the TeX Live Manager and its
GUI.