why is e.g. web2c in the texmf tree?

[David Carlisle]

> Do you know whether this [MakeTeXTeX] has been switched on in teTeX 0.4? 

It is switched off. (It can slow things down, eg on a first run
through LaTeX when .aux .bbl .toc etc files are not there, you end up
calling a script to try to generate each one. It's quite fun though.
You just tell your students to go 

latex thesis

and if they haven't written a thesis by then the script triggers and
writes one for them...


> Well, treat this letter as a first official request for this :-)

You really think that was the first????

My point really was that `longtable.sty' is a bad example to take.
It was a bad decision to give it a long name. Whether or not the name
gets changed should not be used as part of the decision on how TDS
should be designed. Design the TDS based on some general criteria,
then worry afterwards what to do with oddities like longtable.sty.

David

So the following points are not really relevant to TDS but rather to
some LaTeX discussion but since longtable has appeared in a few
mailings on this list lately, my thoughts about this (and
enumerate.sty, and the others) are

1) At the time I named the file (1989 or thereabouts) I had never seen
   a PC and did not know the file was going to end up as part of the
   LaTeX distribution.

2) If I was starting now I would definitely give any package an 8
   letter name.

3) Changing the name of the package after all this time is not
   necessarily a good idea.

   If the name is just changed (eg *only* a longtbl.sty is
   distributed, not a longtable.sty then the long name problem
   is solved but lots of existing documents break, and lots of printed
   books become wrong (and both of these problems could swamp me with
   email queries).

   If the package is distributed in two forms, both long and short
   then the distribution (and its documentation) become more
   complicated and worse, people needing to run old documents (or
   wanting their users to follow The LaTeX Companion, as published)
   on a system using an ISO filesystem still need to take special care
   to install longtable on the local TDS tree on the host filesystem.
   So having the short named form of the package in the distribution
   would just complicate the install, not make it any easier.