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In-Reply-To:  Message of 03 Nov 1993 13:51:49 +0100 (CET) from
              <zach@IGD.FHG.D400.DE>
Date:         Wed, 3 Nov 93 15:06:05 EST
From: Werenfried Spit <SPIT@VM.CI.UV.ES>
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Status: R


On 03 Nov 1993 13:51:49 +0100 (CET) <zach@IGD.FHG.D400.DE> said:
>When you come to sysadmins and the like:
>>It also makes not so (La)TeX fluent users and system administrators much more
>>reluctant to upgrade their systems"
>i think, sysadmins will usually install a new LaTeX while leaving the old
>one where it has been (and it will linger there for a long time, probably).
>And if the changes in the documents can be done with an awk-script once
>and for all, i don't see a problem.
As long as there is a well functioning awk and as long as someone takes the
trouble to write a good script for it and as long as the users get to know
precisely what script they should run on their old files.
So, yes, I do think there is a problem. First of all I think that upgrading
should be done completely within TeX; we should not rely on awk, patch or
any other external tool (because there is almost no tool that can be used
on all systems). Secondly, as Frank Poppe already mentioned: upgrades should
be transparent to the users as much as possible. (I'm not a sysop, but I
do a lot of TeX related installing for the department. When I install a new
version of something I try to make sure that the users can continue to work
just as they were used to when they don`t use new functionality; in the
announcement of the new verion I usually try to provide something like
'if an old document suddenly causes strange error messages try to
process it with 'oldxxx' instead of 'xxx''-- having the old software
renamed to oldxxx; in case of new styles even this should be completely
unnecessary; the users should not note it if they don't need to.
If I'd demand everyone to run some conversion script before they can
continue their work they don't want any upgrades -- and rightly so.)

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