2012/5/4 Apostolos Syropoulos <asyropou...@yahoo.com>: >> >> Don't you feel yourself in a loop? If they patch it, they apparently >> want to use it and if they want to use it, it is not useless for them >> because if it were useless, they would not use it and thus they would >> have no reason to patch it. >> > > > No! The problem is that people should start saying that certain parts > of the old TeX world are irrelevant and so they should not be part > of any TeX distribution. For example, on a set of recently compiled > binaries I see the following: > > apostolo@nadya>> ./tex > This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2012/dev) > **^D > ! End of file on the terminal... why? > apostolo@nadya>> ./pdftex > This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-1.40.13 (TeX Live 2012/dev) > restricted \write18 enabled. > **^C > > > The question is: why keeping the tex binary when the pdftex binary can > do the same things? If you throw away the tex binary, then you can > get rid of most useless binaries that manipulate DVI files. > This is because you invoke pdfetex under the name tex, in other works, you ask pdfetex to forget pdf output and e-TeX extensions and behave as the old Knuth's TeX. Thus pdfetex does nothing but responds exactly with what you asked for. > >> If the modern computer environment does not offer important features >> that were implemented in the old environment decades and still work, >> than (at least for me) it is natural to use the old environment. > > That is called conservatism, that is, something against progress... > > A.S. > > ---------------------- > Apostolos Syropoulos > Xanthi, Greece > > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
-- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex