[metapost] Does MetaPost catch on?

[Dirk Laurie]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 07:25:00AM +0200, laurent at math.toronto.edu wrote:

> In contrast, I find the complexities generated by
> integration of TeX into metapost rather daunting. The mere
> matter of  maintaining and updating a metafont-with-TeX
> distribution is bad news. For example, the requirement (in
> practice) that TeX be the up-to-date TeX-Live distribution
> is a discourtesy to other TeX distributions and their
> users. Also, the apparent requirement that the user follow
> the considerable traffic here concerning details and bugs
> of the integration of TeX into metapost is frighening.
> 
In the Linux world, the people who manage the distros by and large
keep up to date with what is considered stable in TeX and its friends,
and nicely integrate it (except Context on Debian-like systems) with
the rest of the distro.  They read this list, and others like it, take 
notice of glitches in the most recent version, and don't upgrade too 
soon.  Maintaining TeX, Metapost, etc on those systems is no more 
tiresome than keeping the OS itself up to date.

In the Windows world, the people that give you the operating system
don't give a damn for TeX or any other Open Source Software.  What
you need is something like Ubuntu for Windows, an organization of
volunteers that maintains a collection of Windows OSS at the level
of not most recent but of most recent stable, known not be in conflict
with each other.  But this is not the forum to go into all that.

Dirk