[tex-live] your eqexam package

[cfrees at imapmail.org]

On Fri 9th Jul, 2010 at 17:51, Philip Taylor (Webmaster, Ret'd) seems to...:

> Norbert Preining wrote:
>
>> So do we discuss just for the fun of discussing or are you genuinly
>> interested.
>
> Genuinely interested, because an unenforceable law is
> a bad law.  Mojca had already shewn that 80% of the
> hyphenation patterns on TeX Live have no corresponding
> publically available source, yet I think we would all
> agree that they should not be removed.  So if an
> exception can be made for hyphenation patterns, why
> can it not also be made for documentation ?

Perhaps I am missing something but if I needed to edit the hyphenation
patterns for British English, I would suppose that hyph-en-gb.tex would
be the preferred form for editing. I don't see that I would want or
need to go back to the OUP list of words - indeed, I would imagine that
I would want to avoid doing so. This is not to say that there might not
be other reasons for wanting or needing access to that list, but I
would assume that hyph-en-gb.tex would be the relevant source for the
hyphenation patterns in TeX because that would be the preferred format
for editing and modification.

There are some cases in which I am genuinely unsure whether something
counts as part of the source or not, or what, if anything, would count
as the source. But the fact that the concept of 'source' is fuzzy does
not undermine its usefulness or mean that guidelines which employ it
are somehow confused or unenforceable. There are, after all, many, many
such concepts. Can you give a precise definition of 'book' or 'game'?
If we avoided reliance on fuzzy concepts we would have very few
concepts at our disposal. Things get complicated when you are faced
with unclear cases - as in the UK legal case to determine if teacakes
(I think - might be misremembering) should be classified as 'biscuits'
or 'cakes'. In Britain, one of these is subject to VAT while the other
is not. But the fuzziness of the distinction in some borderline cases
did not render the legal distinction unenforceable or unclear in the
vast majority of cases. (Nobody could reasonably defend the claim that
rich tea fingers are cakes or that victoria sandwiches are biscuits.)

- cfr