[tex-live] TL'10 pretest trial

[Victor Ivrii]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 5:17 AM, Robin Fairbairns
<Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Victor Ivrii <vivrii at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> you need to be aware that
>>
>> according to the UN Universal Bill of Rights
>>
>> "It is indispensable human right to have any software ported free of
>> charge to your preferred platform"
>>
>> However, there is an UNHRC explanation that
>>
>> "All animals are equal but Windows Users are more equal than others
>> and this right is applied only to them and to software developed for
>> Unix/Linux based systems and it is duty of developers to have more
>> than twice available software for Windows than for any other platform"
>
> victor:
>
> this is all very well and amusing, but one should recall that (a) tex
> live advertises that it's available for widnoze, and (b) phil was
> explicitly asked to investigate the latest version on a widnoze box.
>
> i'm not keen on tex on windows, myself (i only ever use it when i've got
> an issue for the faq), but it would be extremely unfortunate, imo, to
> give the impression that tex _doesn't_ live well with windows *for those
> that want/need it*.
>
> robin
>


Robin, I know and what I wrote was never intended as a serious
argument but a a joke. Definitely Windows needs to be supported
despite being a Certified Royal Pain. Philip as a webmaster should
know what a Royal Pain is MSIE (...,6,7,8) support.


Philip's remarks are not unfounded and many go beyond windows (f.e.
incomplete URLs on mirman were a stumbling block for majority of users
if not everyone on the first run of the installer or updater,  I
believe that majority guessed a correct URL on the second or third
run, but some people could not).

However there is a bit more serious argument:

in pretest mode the number beyond platform does not really matter: if
Windows had 1000 times more users than some other platform, it does
not need 1000 times more testers (well it needs more testers because
there are at least 3 or 4 different popular windows platforms)

BTW MacOSX has an OSX version and arch variations.

Victor
-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii