Re: texconfig in tetex-3.0 again

Hi,

>>>>> "George" == George White <[email protected]> writes:

  >> > I understand that things do change but if somebody is trying to
  >> use > 'texconfig' as root then there is currently a really
  >> serious chance > that s/he is attempting a wrong thing.  It does
  >> not seem to be a > very hard to check; so at least in such
  >> situation a warning in a > style "Are you really sure that you
  >> know what you are doing?  Maybe > you really meant
  >> 'texconfig-sys' instead?" could be displayed with a > possible
  >> option that allows to suppress that if trully unwarranted.  > The
  >> same goes for other two utilities.  That would go a very long >
  >> way to alleviate the problem.
  >> 
  >> I agree.

  > Useful features that benefit a small number of users should not be
  > a priority.  It is is important to your situation, do it for your
  > site and offer a patch back to the community.  Even if it never
  > makes it into the main package, other sites that share your
  > problem would be free to use the patch.

I even don't consider such a patch as being useful.  The problem
obviously is that people don't know that a new feature had been added.
This problem cannot be solved by such a patch.  This problem cannot be
solved at all if people expect that a new release is identiccal with
the old one.

Thomas asked for comments on the list before he made the change and
most people (almost everyone) wanted it as it is now.

The change is made in teTeX-3.0 and now also in TeXLive2005.
teTeX-3.0 is now part of several Linux distributions.  It has been
ported to MacOS-X as well.  TeXLive cannot be changed anyway.

Changing it now will lead to a lot of confusion.  Distributing a patch
will even lead to much more confusion because the system then does not
behave as documented.

It's always painful if a significant change is made, but confusion
cannot be diminished by changing it again.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO.
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