On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 10:53 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 18 Oct 2011, George N. White III wrote: >> Users also don't like to discover that the publishers' LaTeX format they >> need won't work with the distro TeX, or that a document that formats >> correctly >> on a co-author's Mac or Windows system won't format on their linux system. > > That seems to me to be a reason to *continue* support for older versions, > not a reason to *end* it. I don't understand how you got from the above > to the next thing you wrote:
No -- newer versions have to deal with changes to external interfaces (fonts, image formats, library versions, etc.) so end up adding extra code to check for old versions and work around limitations, or do without some desirable features that can't be implemented on the older version. It takes real work to support older versions and the options to make improvements are constrained. Compromises are needed to live within the hardware limitations of baseline systems at the time the design is fixed. This thinking would still have TeX configurations that could run in 16-bit memory address limits. Even if you think that would be useful, the people who do the heavy lifting tend to use current or even leading edge hardware and are going to be more interested in the new capabilities they can get by taking advantage of the latest hardware developments than minimizing memory footprints. Ultimately, the decisions are made by the people who write the code. >> The TeX ecosystem needs some reasonable limits on how long old versions >> should be supported. If users can't get adequate support from their > > -- > Matthew Skala > [email protected] People before principles. > http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/ > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- George N. White III <[email protected]> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
