Don Simons wrote:
> There have been some interesting suggestions and in my last posting I even got
> sucked a bit into "gee whiz yeah we can do that" mode. But I still haven't
> seen
> any convincing arguments about why the next version of PMX shouldn't REQUIRE
> eTeX and the expanded MusiXTeX. (Cornelius stated that "installing the new
> MusiXTeX involves some work", and that's true if simply replacing 5 files
> counts
> as work). I think what it really comes down to is whether there are any users
> with computers that are too small to handle the increased capacity. I can't
> imagine there are, but if you're out there, please speak up, and if there are
> any other good reasons for continuing to play "small ball" I'd really like to
> hear them.
The LaTeX team (or perhaps it's the LaTeX3 team, I can't remember) changed the
requirement for the default TeX engine to be e-TeX a few years ago (at that
point the idea was that the kernel would continue to use vanilla TeX only but
that the requirement for e-TeX would assist package authors). I agree that it
seems perfectly reasonable to assume that anyone who wants to stay up-to-date
with TeX is now using a distro that has e-TeX - I hope anyone still using a
machine on a regular basis that can't run e-TeX has a soldering iron and a good
supply of spare diodes and capacitors 'cos those machines' motherboards aren't
gonna work for much longer! At least 286/386/486 machines are slow enough that
silicon drift in the CPU isn't an issue :o)
However, regardless of whether you include eTeX or not, you must have code to
detect its presence and display a clean error message because in all
distributions there is a difference between running tex and etex even though
there is no difference between running pdftex and pdfetex:
\ifx\undefined\eTeXversion
\errhelp={Consult your Local Guide for details on using e-TeX}
\loop
\errmessage{Sources compiled with PMX require e-TeX}
\iftrue
\repeat
\fi
The inclusion of the \loop depends on whether you want the user to be able to
press enter to ignore the error (and presumably just be stopped by another
error further down the input file)
David
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