Message-Id: <199312231200.AA22969@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
In-Reply-To:  <9312221524.AA18779@m1.cs.man.ac.uk> (P.Taylor@rhbnc.ac.uk)
Date:         Wed, 22 Dec 93 15:43:37 GMT
From: David Carlisle <carlisle@cs.man.ac.uk>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple Recipients of <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      RE: LaTeX2e
Status: R


>>> The new release of LaTeX is now available for testing.

 > Many congratulations; I have successfully installed it under MS/DOS
 > (emTeX) and VAX/VMS (TeX 3.141 and 3.1415).  But I suggest that the
 > documentation should _not_ suggest copying the style files to the
 > normal TeX-Inputs directory; if this is done, and a catastrophic
 > bug later discovered, it will not be possible to revert to the
 > original LaTeX 2.09 without major hassle.  Another suggestion would
 > be to provide pro formas for all .Cfg files (some are provided, but
 > others are not).  And I think that there is a mistake in the
 > documentation on page~19, where \@filename@parse is subsequently
 > referred to as \filename@parse.

 > 					Philip Taylor, RHBNC.

Thanks, we hope you find it useful.

It is hard to word the documentation so that it makes sense on all
machine types, but anyway we would agree with you that as this is a
*test* release, it would be unwise to replace latex209 with LaTeX2e at
your site.

At Manchester (a UNIX site) I have installed it as the following shell
script (latex2e)

=======
#!/bin/ksh

export TEXINPUTS=/usr/common/lib/tex3/latex2e/inputs:$TEXINPUTS:

/usr/common/bin/virtex \&latex2e $*
=======

which means essentially that I have put all the LaTeX2e files in a
site readable directory that is not in the standard TeX search path.
Then arranged TEXINPUTS so latex2e looks there first, and then in the
`standard' places later. LaTeX209 (`latex') is just a link to virtex
in the normal way for web2c TeX, and so does not `see' any of the
LaTeX2e files.

I am sure something similar can be done on DOS, Macs, VMS,.....

pro formas for .cfg files would be a good idea (although for testing
we would rather you didnt ConFiGure things too much:-)
The exception is texsys.cgf which you may *have* to configure to get a
running system on your machine. We would be *very* interested in
getting texsys.cfg settings for other TeX implementations.

> \@filename@parse

Thanks, I expect that there will be some other things to fix when we
get back next year:-)

David