July 1st: Beginners TeX Hour: Why Software Sucks: Geeks Drive Stick Shift Cars

[Norbert Preining]

Hi

> The videos from last week's heavy technical TeX Hour on TeX Live (except
> for a few to follow tomorrow) are at:
> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7jEC4iuK5Q0HPccM1IE3ygD

Watched it. A few comments:
- first of all, move your meetings to reasonable time for me and I will
  participate - but don't complain that TeX Live people are not
  interested. I told you this already a few times.

- Having only the tex macros gives you say 90%, but of what one normally
  needs, but if you want actual reproducability you need to have the
  fonts **and** the binaries also available from older versions,
  otherwise there is no guarantee that the outputs are the same.
  That defeats all the experiments how small it is for only tex files,
  yes, they are not big, that we know.

- As Nelson said, just hacking kpse to return a handle to a file from a
  pack is not enough, because there are hundreds of other programs in a
  variety of languages that do NOT use kpse and still open these files.
  So one needs to - as Nelson said - rewrite the complete IO layer of
  the OS running, **and** in addition doing that for all platforms we
  support .... good luck.

Enjoy your experiments.

Norbert

--
PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
Fujitsu Research  +  IFMGA Guide  +  TU Wien  +  TeX Live  + Debian Dev
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