Bug#338608: Documenting change to tetex 3.0; deprecating initex and virtex.
On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 04:54:30PM +0100, Frank K?ster wrote:
> Wrong - the Debian package doesn't deprecate anything, and not even
> teTeX does. Ten months too late, Debian has a package for teTeX 3.0
> which drops a symlink and thus support for a prognam name which has been
> deprecated for years.
I have used TeX for years, even co-maintaining the Debian tetex-*
packages, and had no idea that "initex" was deprecated rather than tex
-ini simply being an alternative interface. That's what The TeXbook
calls it, that's what I used.
> > initex has been superceded by -ini option of tex
> > command; invoke 'tex -ini ' instead. For virtex, there is no
> > replacement, since Debian tetex maintainers know of no users of the
> > command.
>
> To me, this sounds offensive against us Debian maintainers. The fact is
> that invoking virtex has done the same as invoking tex ever since tex
> existed as an executable or symlink, and IIRC even in the texbook Knuth
> just calls "tex", never "virtex", except maybe in the installation
> chapter. I might be wrong here, but in any case we never said anythink
> like "we don't care for users who still need virtex", which I read from
> your sentence, but instead we said that nobody needs to invoke it (which
> is simply a true fact).
True: there is no need to invoke virtex on Web2C-based systems. (On
the original systems, "tex" had the plain format pre-loaded, whereas
virtex had no format preloaded. But we don't dump static memory
images of tex any longer, so this is not relevant on our systems.)
Note that The TeXbook makes no reference at all to virtex, but
multiple references to INITEX.
> > 2. Is 'virtex' equal to 'tex &plain ' ?
>
> Since you are so fond of old documentation, you should look that up
> yourself in the manpage of tex.
It is under Web2C, but different if you read the tex.web source code.
Julian
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