Message-Id: <199401250731.AA22816@mail.cs.tu-berlin.de>
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Date:         Mon, 24 Jan 1994 22:06:44 +0100
From: Frank Mittelbach <MITTELBACH@mzdmza.zdv.uni-mainz.de>
Sender: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list LATEX-L <LATEX-L@DHDURZ1.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: LaTeX2e vs LaTeX3
Status: R

> Subj: LaTeX2e vs LaTeX3

> Hello LaTeX3 team.

Hallo Tim

> How compatible will LaTeX3 be with LaTeX2e?
>
> Will LaTeX3 use the same \documentclass, etc. commands for
> including styles and macros?

most certainly source compatible, that is user commands will survive.
Since one of the goals of LaTeX3 is to provide a suitable designer
interface internals, eg current packages for 209/2e will probably not
survive without a real upgrade.

this is different to 209 -> 2e where we took great pain to ensure that
most style files can be used unchanged with 2e.

As it might interest you: after fixing the few but important bugs that
prevent some of the compatibility stuff to work we where able to run
all regression test files (files produced by volunteers to test for
bugs/features in LaTeX (a sort of trip test for LaTeX)) through
LaTeX2e all producing the same results as under 209. Leslie's LaTeX
manual went through as well (finding one bug).

I hope that we will be able to send those bug fixes very soon to the
servers.

The goal for LaTeX2e was to unify the various LaTeX dialects that had
emerged over the years not to provide something essentially better;
although that was possible in several areas.


One of the goals for LaTeX3 is a real designer interface, that is not
possible if you built on top of unusable lower interfaces. Thus on a
class/package level the differences will be very noticable.

> Sorry for a question you are probably sick of, but I am new
> to the list. When is the target release date for LaTeX3?

Yes, I'm sick of that. My favourate answer is ``two year from now
where `now' is a variable depending on the current date''.

Excuse me, but I really don't know. Given the limited resources it
should probably never happen but as long as we won't give up (and so
far i don't see any sign for that) it most certainly will
nevertheless. Unfortunately, an undertaking like latex3 is something
essentially different to writing a package, may it be as complicated
as hell. The 2e release, for example has tight up our time for the
last four month and i hope that we can soon return to latex3 work. I
think it was a well spend time---i hope that those who have tried the
2e beta release will agree---; we have learned a lot on building up
distributions installation procedures and and and.  But it has cost
time, in fact the whole maintenance of the current latex, ie 209 and
from spring on 2e does cost a lot of time if it is done in the spare
time of a few individuals.

there is an enormous amount of work to be done and the people working
in the core group are really devoting much more time to the project
than they should (well, i shouldn't say that, they might stop :-) but
there is also a lot of work that can be done by people who like to
help but don't have much time. I can only repeat:

 o There is a volunteer task list

 o Many of the tasked are signed on my individuals

 o But only from some we have heard anything

 o We need that kind of help

 = so everybody who likes to help should consider those topics and if
   one sounds interesting get in contact with the volunteers already
   listed (if there are any) or with us.


Other information can be found in the LaTeX3 public database which
contains several articles about goals and progress of the project.

Frank