Message-Id: <9305031020.AA10835@sc.zib-berlin.dbp.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Date:         Mon, 3 May 93 11:08:15 +0100
From: Paul Taylor <pt@DOC.IC.AC.UK>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
Subject:      Re: documentstyle option versions
Status: R


Oratory on email lists tends to have an effect on the community
in inverse proportion to its length, so let me say briefly that

        I agree strongly with everything Cameron Smith said

There is nothing that can be done about those who refuse to maintain their
copies of software, except perhaps time bombs and booby traps (with fair
warning) for old versions.

Adding features to LaTeX - necessarily to a version which the dinosaurs
don't have - is not the answer.  Indeed the best way of ensuring portability
and reverse compatibility is *not* to use things which might incidentally
be in LaTeX (\@nameuse, for a trivial example, the picture environment for
a more substantial one) and put in tests which hunt around for different
font selections, versions of mssymb.tex and so on.

What *could* usefully be done is to think carefully about the organisation
of the international archive (no, I don't have any good ideas) and use the
filenames there (eg texarchive/macros/generic/diagrams/Taylor/diagrams.tex)
as a standard way of referring to (inputting?) macro files.

Paul Taylor