Re: Towards a new LPPL draft
More nuances of language.
Frank Mittelbach <Frank.Mittelbach@uni-mainz.de> writes to
debian-legal:
> that you produce sniffenlatex which has its own complete tree and in
> there has identical file names to the pristine LaTeX tree so that both
> trees live side by side.
For new LPPL language it might make sense to hold that "sniffenlatex"
is an _implemented_ _project_ which would then live parallel to the
LaTeX Project's implemented project. Then names inside implemented
projects can be unrestricted since the objects inside them are
different objects solely by virtue of residence under the different
implemented project.
If there is an easy way for (1) a human user and (2) a formatting
robot to discern the provenance of a given implemented project, then I
see no reason in principle why there must be one implemented project
that is "legally" canonical.
Of course, however, the LaTeX Project's implemented project will be
the only sensible one for at least the next twenty years quite
independent of whatever TeX engines come along. :-)
The license must have rules to keep the provenance thing honest.
It will be important to warn in the proximity of the LPPL for those
not trying to conduct a revolt against the LaTeX Project that their
greatest mileage for change will be with intelligent use of
\documentclass to begin a document with a class, whether custom or
not, and \usepackage to call in styles (order of call significant).
In Linux everyone needs to understand that just as non-vendor-managed
software is placed outside of vendor areas, custom items provided for
an implemented project under TDS/Kpathsea are also placed within the
implemented project outside of the project's native area (the main
texmf tree), say under texmf-local or texmf-var.
(I'm not suggesting that an implemented project be required to support
TDS/Kpathsea just as I would not suggest requiring that a filesystem
implementation support more than 8+3 monocase filenames.)
(Maybe there should be a warning near the LPPL that OS-level
TeX-related environmentals these days may not be wanted.)
\grumble{I found an otherwise excellent article through a reference in
this morning's mail by well known authors from high profile academic
institutions that began with the obsolete \documentstyle command.}
-- Bill
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