Re: Is there a chance for teTeX-3.0 in sarge?
Hi,
Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
> The people that have tested teTeX-3.0, maybe; but not the ones just
> downloading from CTAN. Moreover, what can "adapt their documents" mean?
> Either there was a hack in them, using package internals that stopped
> working - you cannot expect that to work after an upgrade. Or there's a
> major flaw in the package that has been undetected as yet.
Sometimes you have to do something for which there isn't (yet) a
well-known published API. For instance, back around 2001, it was not
deemed bad practice (at least on fctt, IIRC) to test if \pdfoutput was
defined (as opposed to: equal to 0 or 1) in order to determine whether
we are producing a PDF or a DVI file. When upgrading, documents with
these tests will have to be adapted (which means using ifpdf.sty).
That's what I meant.
But as I noted in the other mail, this is not really an argument against
teTeX 3 in sarge, because incompatible upgrades *will* eventually happen
(be it in sarge or etch) and the documents that used such hacks *will*
have to be adapted anyway. Sooner or later.
> What I want to say with this is: In terms of finding incompatibilities
> between (La)TeX packages, we don't gain much if we have a testing phase
> of 1 year compared to 3 months, and I would not take this as a
> particular strong argument against pushing 3.0 into sarge at this
> stage.
I see.
> Surely. Let them be bitten by the upgrade - then they won't be bitten if
> they finally choose to use backports of 3.0 because 2.0.2 is to ancient
> even for them, shortly before etch is "very near to release", you know,
> somewhen in 2010 :-(
Ack.
--
Florent
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