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Re: Proposal: removing libc5, altgcc and all their old-days dependencies



On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 12:39:45AM +1200, Philip Charles wrote:
> >
> 
> Take the Lawyer example.  He probably bought his legal practice when it
> was all Word.  He does not like it, he is stuck.
> 

If he was really interested in his data, he should convert them in a
standard and portable format soon. The same for all that people
who have the same problem. Registration and maintainance of
historical e-data is not something that Debian can manage. 
It's a big problem which requires strong choices. 
Anyone who stores in proprietary formats his data is looking 
for problems. They have to convert them as soon as possible.

> Take my wife's Ph.D., started seven years ago.  We looked at MS Word and
> it could not cut the mustard so she stuck with WP 5.1.  What free
> alternatives were there then?  Maybe Lyx, certainly latex, but my wife is
> a musiciannot a geek.  Anyway, her M.A. thesis was in WP 5.1.  So when the

Mmmm, bad example. See http://www.lomuto.it/HomeMicheleLomutoE.htm
That is a non-geek musician who uses Emacs and Latex only :-P 
because he is seriuously concerned about his data.

> Please remember this is 2003 and not 1983.  People have accumulated a lot
> on their HDDs in twenty years.
> 

... and they are also completely uninterested in storing docs in a way 
that will allow them to read their own data in the future...

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine



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