[tex-live] TL'10 pretest trial

[Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard]

Hi,

Le 06/07/2010 05:01, Norbert Preining a écrit :
> On Mo, 05 Jul 2010, Philipp Stephani wrote:
>> If they decide to support it, then I think it's not really helpful if
>> team members constantly criticize the OS that they officially pretend
>> to support.
> 
> What has criticizing to do with supporting?
> 
Well, imagine you are a windows user, you come to the TL list for help (and/or
to report a bug or request an improvement), and often the reply is "you're on
windows? be happy that it works at all", followed by a rant about a randomly
picked windows gotcha. Won't you feel like a 2nd-class citizen in the TL world?

> Remember we are doing that on volunteer basis, none of us is earning 
> one meager cent from that, and now you ask us not to criticize those
> stupid shortcomings that creates long lng hours of headache for us?
> 
>From a pragmatic point of view, the long hours of headache are kinda wasted if
the final impression of users is that using TL on windows is not really ok.

Anyway, I agree with you that if someone asks us about a particular feature that
we have problems implementing, it is perfectly ok to complain about a particular
problem with windows (like "sorry, but it will be difficult to port this
particular software since there is no <typical-unix-feature> on windows, so
we're afraid it won't happen").

But here the original question was about backslashes vs slashes in paths: a
purely arbitrary convention. Nothing to do with how ftype incorrectly handles
some signals, for example ;-)

> Please either start contributing code that is portable yourself, or
> stop telling us what we should or should not do, thanks.
> 
Sorry, but I think Philipp (Stephani) is right, those regular rants on the TL
list are counter-productive and give a bad image of our work on windows.

> (asking himself sometimes what people expect and believe)
> 
They expect a clear position: we can't say "be happy that it works at all on
windows" and "we fully support windows since the 90's" in the same thread, this
is inconsistent. Since we support windows, people don't need to be "happy" that
things work (at least, no more happy that they are on unix): we claim it works,
so it works, period.

Manuel.