[tex-live] TL'10 pretest trial

[T T]

On 5 July 2010 10:50, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd)
<P.Taylor at rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
> T T wrote:
>
>> The forward vs.
>> backward slashes issue is just a minor, unimportant detail here
>
> I agree that it's minor, but I don't agree that it is unimportant.
> Being able to take a string from a dialogue box and paste it
> into Explorer / CMD / <whatever> is important, as is the simple
> fact that Windows users /expect/ their path slashes to be
> backslashes.  Suppose I were to embed a "URL" such as the
> following  in this message :
>
>        http:\\www.tug.org\texlive\
>
> What possible use would that be to anybody ?  Yes, you can
> see what is meant, but you can't do anything useful with it :
> just the same for
>
>        E:/TeX/Live/Common/TeXMF/Var
>
> from the TL installer under Windows.

Dear Phil,

I would expect that a typical user will want to copy a path from
explorer (or other palce) to the installer, not the other way around,
and this works just fine with backslashes.  Also, using "slashed"
paths in explorer (and throughout the Windows API) works just fine for
me, contrary to what you say.  Have you actually tried and found
otherwise?  So, I don't find your arguments fully convincing/accurate.

I agree that slashes are against expectations of windows users, but
there are other issues/features that I deem of higher priority and
would like us to focus on first.  (And for the record, I'm a Windows
user myself and care a lot about how TL works on that platform.)

Cheers,

Tomek