Message-Id: <9311031016.AA23064@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de>
In-Reply-To:  Message of 02 Nov 1993 15:03:02 -0700 from
              <michal@GORTEL.PHYS.UALBERTA.CA>
Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 93 11:01:56 EST
From: Werenfried Spit <SPIT@VM.CI.UV.ES>
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: I do not like 'nf' in style names
Status: R


On 02 Nov 1993 15:03:02 -0700 Michal Jaegermann said:
> ›...!     Apparently trivial matter of slightly modifying your
>document to conform to "new" style names is not so trivial if you deal
>with an existing archive which holds a substantial number of such
>documents and which could be processed automatically.  It also makes
>not so (La)TeX fluent users and system administrators much more
>reluctant to upgrade their systems.

I agree with Michael on this point. There is another reason for which
I would like to have styles keep their names: writing something with
multiple authors on different locations. Very often in such cases the
details of the TeX installation differ on the various sites. I hate
to have to change eg. 'times' to 'nftimes' in the \documentstyle command
before I can process the latest version my coauthor sent me, and have
to think to change it back before sending him my latest stuff. If the
names are identical the bother with implementation details is under the
hood.  As long as each author keeps a variety of times.sty that works at
his site, everything works well.
(Now, of course I now that this can break down; in one case it took me some
time to find out that a coauthor had a different version of TeX running,
which could have been prevented by using different filenames. But this
is a smaller price to pay IMO).
A good thing to do IMO is to try to have instead of various **.sty versions
one version which contains them all and detects which FSS (or version of
LaTeX) is running. There are a few examples of this smart behaviour around.
In that way one can even keep various versions of TeX or LaTeX or FSS
around on the same site. (Especially the three FSSs (OFSS, NFSS1 and NFSS2)
are rather easy to detect.)

        ------------------------------------------------
        Werenfried Spit          email: spit@vm.ci.uv.es
                                   tel: +34-6-386 4550
        Dep. de Fisica Teorica,  Universitat de Valencia