[texhax] TeXLive and fpTeX...

[Fabrice Popineau]

Alan>  We have fpTeX installed here on our Win/PC machines network to
Alan>  match out Linux/UNIX install of teTeX. I noticed that in the 2004
Alan>  TeXLive/CTAN distribution fpTeX is no longer included.

Karl>  As previously mentioned, it's there, but sadly without an
Karl>  installer.  I gather Fabrice is still working on that.

No, I won't work on packaging texlive anymore.

Alan>  When I went back to the 2003 distribution it was not there
Alan>  either.

Karl>  The 2003 distribution hasn't retroactively changed!  fptex is
Karl>  still there, unchanged.

Alan>  Has it been depreciated in favor of the MicTeX version of proTeXt
Alan>  and if so why?

Karl>  fptex has not been deprecated.

fptex is defunct and will be replaced by xemtex. I should have done that
much earlier. Xemtex is made of what _I_ am using, no more no less (aka
: xemacs, ghostscript, pdftex, perl, imagemagick).

My personal analysis of the current situation is that for
the almost uniformly unix based texlive development team, it is much
more easier to deliver a separate windows tex distribution than to bear
the requirements of a foreign (aka win32) platform on the development scene.

I have tried for several years to reach a point where there would have
been a single source tree for unix and windows, but failed. Maybe I
just didn't find the right way to do it. Anyway I won't lose more time
in this direction.

Fabrice