Re: Encoding the name in the file contents
At Thu, 25 Jul 2002 12:50:49 -0700 (PDT), Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>
wrote:
>Boris Veytsman <borisv@lk.net> wrote:
>> Let me tell you how the things are organized in the TeX world. There
>> are dozens of TeX implementations. Some are free, some are commercial,
>> some are open, some are closed. I would not be surprised if some of
>> these are not written in C and do not use the standard web2c. The
>> authors of these implementations package LaTeX with their
>> systems.
>
>I see now. I was concerning myself with free software, whereas you
>have a desire to interoperate with proprietary software. Fair enough.
>What if this md5sum were computed using TeX? Assuming reasonable
>performance, would that be a solution?
It would still be pointless, since there would be nothing to compare the
computed checksum against, unless the file itself says what checksum it is
supposed to have, and in that case we're just doing a more complicated
variant of the \NeedsTeXFormat.
Furthermore you most likely couldn't get anything near a reasonable
performance for an md5sum implemented using TeX macros. There are, for
example, no bit operations available in the language. If you think you
would need any, then you would have to tabulate them, and that gets
unreasonably expensive (about 20 times the "cost" of the LaTeX kernel and a
couple of packages) already for byte operations.
>Boris Veytsman <borisv@lk.net> wrote:
>> Even if this were possible, did you consider the logistics nightmare of
>> conversion of megabytes of LaTeX code written by hunderds of authors
>> to the new authentificaiton scheme?
>
>Wouldn't this logistics nightmare happen with a license change as
>well?
Why should there be any need to change anything but the text of the
license? That's only one file.
Lars Hellström
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