Re: texconfig in tetex-3.0 again

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 10:52:02PM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> 
> Thomas asked for comments on the list before he made the change and
> most people (almost everyone) wanted it as it is now.

You just clearly demonstrated dangers of comparatively small and
specialized lists discussing wider questions.  Obviously responders
were happily clueless about issues and problems or running multiuser
installations and backcompatibilty.  It is evident that  the change
could have been easily made to provide the same facilities for
non-root users as they are available right now and not breaking an
established behaviour if you install things as root.

At the time when Thomas asked I was not even privy to an existence
of this list and I do not recall the subject raised even on
comp.text.tex which likely has somewhat different audience although
I would surely not call it representative for all users and system
administrators who have to deal with that right now.

> The change is made in teTeX-3.0 and now also in TeXLive2005.
> teTeX-3.0 is now part of several Linux distributions.

I know that and that is why I wrote that "milk is already spilled".
That is the reason that I did not ask to revert and/or redesign but
only for an addition of some warnings in situations where a usage
without "-sys" suffix will be nearly always wrong.  Now teTeX-3.0
will have a wider exposure and shit will be hitting fan quite
frequently.  Even worse, I can confidently predict that a
substantial portions of these updated installations will remain with
broken configurations although most likely you will be blissfully
not aware of this.
   
> TeXLive cannot be changed anyway.

It will have further editions, I hope, and things are getting fixed
all the time.  By your argument TeXLive should be still using an
initial teTeX release.

   Michal