Suggested feature: Portable document archive

[Reinhard Kotucha]

Simon,
I can assure you that what you suggest will never happen.  Hence the
whole discussion is useless.

Of course it's nice if you can pass the whole project as a single ZIP
file to somebody else.  But you can do it already right now.  All you
need is a script which creates a ZIP file.  No more, no less.

It's definitely neither possible nor desirable to replace the file
system with a ZIP file.  That would break millions or billions
workflows whithout any good reason.  It would render programs like
grep, sed, diff,... useless for no good reason, as others told you
already.  It also renders all text editors and TeX-IDEs useless.

All you need is a script which creates a ZIP file in order to pass
your files to somebody else.  No need to change anything else.

Microsoft Word is not a good example.  It doesn't allow users to use
the user interface they prefer, there is no way to manipulate files
with external tools, etc.  This is definitely not what we want.

And as far as beginners you mentioned in a previous mail are
concerned, my experience is that most of them are beginners only for a
couple of days.  They all learn very fast, often amazingly fast.
Learning LaTeX is not very difficult.  Mentioning "beginners" at all
usually means "there are people who are even more stupid than me".
But this assumption is almost always wrong.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover                    mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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