Re: teTeX: no next release

Reinhard Kotucha ha scritto:

>>>>>>"Axel" == Axel Thimm <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> 
>   > I hope tetex will be picked up and maintained under the same name
>   > and quality. Maybe the whole load of it is too much for one person
>   > and therefore a tetex developer group is needed? If a critical
>   > mass is gathered maybe it has a chance. I could offer
>   > infrastructure for collaborative work (trac/svn etc.).
> 
> As Thomas said, teTeX is 100% in TeXLive.  So why do we need a tetex
> developer group?
> 
> TeXLive and teTeX are the same thing.  The main reason teTeX is
> discontinued is that it is too much work to maintain the texmf tree
> and that different people are working on the same thing.  
>     
> What you propose means to waste human resources.  The teTeX developer
> group and the TeXLive developers would still work on the same thing.
> 
> Are you aware that TeXLive is developed by only two people?  If you
> find someone who is willing to spend a vast amount of his spare time
> to maintain a texmf tree, ask him to contact <[email protected]>. 
> 
> The reason for teTeX's reliability is that Thomas is one of the best
> shell programmers worldwide.  You cannot simply replace him by a
> "tetex developer group" and expect the same quality.
> 
> And though teTeX is discontinued, it is not dead.  Thomas is still
> alive and will help if necessary.
> 
>   > I hope tetex will be picked up and maintained under the same name
>   > and quality.
> 
> Do you realy think that people care about who has written all the nice
> software they are using?  Are you subscribed to the texhax mailing
> list?
> 
>  "I'm using WinEDT and get the error message '! TeX capacity exceeded'"
> 
> They do not even know that they are using TeX!
> 
> But if you look into the TeXLive sources, you'll see where it all
> comes from.
> 
> Note that the name "TeXLive" still contains Thomas Esser's initials.
> 
> Regards,
>   Reinhard
> 

I maintain a small tree of packages (which adds or changes the tetex
default tetex-src), that I use in Mandriva teTeX's SPEC file/package I maintain; 
here is:

http://peoples.mandriva.com/~ghibo/tetex-texmf-extras-gg-3.0d.tar.bz2
http://peoples.mandriva.com/~ghibo/tetex-texmfsrc-extras-gg-3.0d.tar.bz2

Soon I'll update to 3.0e with latest (december) LaTeX base files. Maybe can
be merged in a upcoming teTeX tree.

Note also that the teTeX's Thomas work is far beyond than a specific single 
platform (although Linux is the widespread one, there are still support for 
plenty of other architectures which maybe in these days are not so much 
widespread, but still used [e.g. SGI, HP/UX, etc. and that many of us don't have 
access to anymore]). I've seen the tetexrpm initiative and that's good, 
although, I'm scared of having zillion of packages on for each LaTeX style of 
100kbytes long. Better a single base and an extra.

IMHO I suggest to continue the Tomas's monolitic model (on the other hand it's 
pretty good) rather than reinventing the wheel with something of modular,
but just having it with public cvs/svn access (i.e. with permission of 
committing to a group of developers), rather than migrating the whole TeXlive 
tree. There will be a tree for texmf tree and one for texmfsrc. IMHO there 
should be some mechanism of quality checking/approving/testing rather than just 
put there every single bell and whistle of LaTeX styles around in CTAN. Maybe 
every six months instead of one year there could be a release of the tetexsrc 
tree (with some RC before). And maybe every one year of the tetex tree. In this 
way maybe also Thomas may, from time to time, have a look to (I don't think he 
will abandon tetex as end user...).

Bye
Giuseppe.