Bug#225833: 225833: letter vs A4 in TeX
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> On Mit, 31 Jan 2007, Frank Küster wrote:
>> Have you reread the discussion in bug #379089? It was closed with this
>> changelog entry:
>
> Yes, but I didn't comment because I didn't agree. And I still do not
> agree. If we do this, then we have about hundreds of config files we
> should create:
> dlocate \*.cfg | grep texmf-texlive | wc -l
> and these are only those which are named .cfg. If one wants to go to
> extrem why not make latex.ltx eg a config file.
Most of the files that end with "cfg" are not intended as configuration
files. See for example Ralf's comment in #379089 about listings.cfg,
or a random sample that I picked, subfig.cfg:
%% This file is NOT the source for the subfig package, because almost
%% all comments have been stripped from it. It is NOT the preferred form
%% of the subfig package for making modifications to it.
%%
%% Therefore you can NOT redistribute and/or modify THIS file.
...
> One might change
> something in latex.ltx which changes system wide the format for quite a
> lot of formats. And it would not survive an upgrade ...
Yes, this is technically possible, just as I can make changes to
usr/include/kpathsea/tex-file.h to change the system-wide behavior. But
it doesn't make sense, whereas changing geometry.cfg does make sense.
I see only one alternative to making geometry.cfg a conf(iguration)file
and doing nothing, and that is to convince upstream to make dvips the
default. Then we could ignore geometry.cfg.
> Other example (the first I got in my hand), ebezier.sty. I change it to
> have other definitions of
> \newfont{\vrm}{cmr5}
> \newfont{\virm}{cmr6}
This is analogous to changing headers, in my view.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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