[tex-live] [texhax] amsmath update - any changes?

[John Collins]

George N. White III wrote:
> 
> When TL implements a change from a major publisher that was announced 
> some time ago, the people who use the package (e.g., who publish in one 
> of the affected journals) should not be surprised.  The fact that many 
> authors read the "instructions to authors" no more than once is not 
> something TL can solve.

For articles currently being written, the authors should obey the 
instructions to authors and use the journal's current package.  But there's 
a big backward compatibility issue.  E.g., there are many older papers on
arXiv.org.  When a widely used package is deleted from CTAN and TL, these
papers are no longer compilable without the source files being edited.

To see the scale of the problem, I googled for "elsart.cls" in
site:arxiv.org and got over 1900 hits.  (Elsart.cls is one of the class
files in the now-removed elsevier package.)

It seems to me that a good policy is that a widely used package should
normally remain on CTAN (and TL) even when obsolete.

John Collins