X-VM-v5-Data: ([nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil nil] ["2493" "Tue" "9" "November" "93" "18:26:54" "+0000" "Paul Taylor" "pt@DOC.IMPERIAL.AC.UK" nil "45" "all-purpose files & suffixes" "^Date:" nil nil "11"]) Return-Path: Received: from sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (mailserv) by dagobert.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0/24.6.93) id AA09690; Tue, 9 Nov 93 19:28:48 +0100 Received: from vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (vm.hd-net.uni-heidelberg.de) by sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE (4.1/SMI-4.0-sc/03.06.93) id AA11671; Tue, 9 Nov 93 19:28:45 +0100 Message-Id: <9311091828.AA11671@sc.ZIB-Berlin.DE> Received: from DHDURZ1 by vm.urz.Uni-Heidelberg.de (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 3897; Tue, 09 Nov 93 19:27:21 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2600; Tue, 09 Nov 93 19:27:16 CET Received: from DHDURZ1 by DHDURZ1 (Mailer R2.08 R208004) with BSMTP id 2598; Tue, 09 Nov 93 19:27:13 CET Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project Date: Tue, 9 Nov 93 18:26:54 +0000 From: Paul Taylor Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project To: Multiple Recipients of Subject: all-purpose files & suffixes Status: R X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 1132 I find it curious (I want to leave it open whether that is positive or negative) that it should be Sebastian who would take up my challenge that user should expect there to be just one times.sty in the archive and that that should always work. It's curious partly because Sebastian is one of the archive maintainers, but more so because his slitex code actually does what I suggest. For the sake of tidiness, maybe there should be one file (times.sty) which tests which situation we're in and calls other approrpiate files. These I suppose ought to have prefixed or suffixed names, BUT they should all say clearly that (collectively) they supersede all other files called times.sty and also what their individual purpose is. You may not like my principle, but that is what users and local system maintainers expect, and rightly so. As a non-driver I can't expoit this analogy very well, but imagine the corresponding situation for spare parts for your car, especially those parts which are not actually involved in making it go. Thinking about it a bit, the suggestion of several different suffices may well be the solution we're looking for. In Unix implementations, macros, fonts, etc are searched for [sought] using "paths", for example TEXINPUTS=.:$HOME/mymacros:/usr/local/tex/macros:/vol/tex/archive// What we need for parallel versions of LaTeX (and other formats) to work correctly is a different path for each one, so that the appropriate times.sty is picked up (in default of my principle above). Unfortunately TEXINPUTS is compiled in to virtex and cannot be switched from the format (though it could be from a surrounding shell script). \documentstyle, \documentclass and \usepackage could implement the same kind of thing, with suffixes (or prefixes or both). There would be a different "path" (list of affixes) for each of these commands, preferably set in a place which is reasonably easy to customise. While we're here, I suggest it's about time we distinguished between "options" (eg A4, Times) and "features" (diagrams, pictex, ...). An "option" is something that can be altered without making LaTeX fall over on the document. Rather than worry too much at this stage about the philosophical differences between the two, I suggest there should simply be two commands, \usepackages and \documentoptions, which are coded to do the same thing (maybe with different paths) and let the users make the distinction as a matter of documenting their documents. Paul