[tex-live] Re: Re: Re: free software, DFSG

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

David Kastrup wrote:
> Giuseppe Bilotta <bilotta78 at hotpop.com> writes:
> > LaTeX and ConTeXt walk around the problems with different
> > methods. Not that I see why TeX should care at all about character
> > sets.
> 
> Because it writes messages to the terminal and to temporary files that
> need to get reread.  Because it outputs the contents of boxes, like
> with overfull box messages and when using \showbox, and it would be
> nice if the output was at all readable.  Because decoding stuff like
> input characters is inefficient, error-prone, and fragile.  Because it
> makes it impossible to have working non-English error messages,
> terminal output, control sequence names, labels and so on.
> 
> Need I continue?

No.

> Surprising that I should have to explain this to
> the author of Aleph.

Surprising where? I have not "authored" anything. I just 
grabbed two handfuls of .ch files to a .web file and made sure 
they clicked together. I didn't even need to have a full 
understanding of what each single line of code did, to do that.

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollar and cents
Pounds shillings and pence
                  (Roger Waters)